Very Cheap (£150?) 1080p/60fps Editing Box - Ideas Please

[Wolfsbane2k]

Hi.

Beware - acknowledge this is a potentially unachievable task/question.

I've been out of the PC market for a while, so looking for some help - I've been running on Raspberry Pi's or 2009/2012 era laptops for 2 years, and have just recovered my "old trusty" AMD X3 720BE from the loft.

However, I've recently started generating 2-3 hours of 1080p/60fps H.264 video 7 days a week, and I'm trying to cut it/edit it down to 3-5 "important" minutes a day, flatten from 180* fisheye, and transcode it for online sharing.
This involves Handbrake, and FFMPEG wrapped up in OEM specific SW packages.

So, I'm trying to get a very cheap video editing "box" to do just this task, possibly even to start one day and leave till the next, but the editing piece is currently a nightmare, as it takes so long just to set up, and then it typically crashes.

So I'm looking to improve my capability.

The "suggested" specs for the SW is "I7-3820QM & 16GB RAM" - which has a Passmark of ~9000, but a price of ~£600 for a supporting full PC.

So, I've currently got access to :
AMD Phenom x3 720 + 2GB DDR2 Ram ( 1 stick died :S ) - Desktop (Passmark# 2700)
C2D T5670 + 4 GB Ram - Laptop (Passmark 1007)
AMD A4-3320 + 4GB RAM - Laptop (Passmark 1261)
I've also got intermittent access to a A8-7100 + 4GB ram ( Passmark 2838), which is in the OH's laptop, but she only uses it for facebook :-S, but "needs it"...

I've got 2 1080p monitors (HDMI) , ATX Case, 7 year old PSU, Keyboard, Mouse, 250GB SSD, DVD/CD drives etc, and a Windows 8.1 license going spare.

Archive Storage isn't a problem, I've got a 23TB NAS running on an old Microserver.

So - given my budget ( I've spent to much on other toys for the past 4 months) , what& where can I go to improve my current performance?
CPU replace isn't an option without replacing Mobo, which means replacing ram as well - ie a motherboard barebones.

This seems to push me into I3-6100 (passmark 5485) or FX6-6300(passmark 6339) territory with 8GB ram and a suitable mobo - any specific suggestions really appreciated

I'm happy to go second hand, so suggestions in that realm appreciated as well.

[shaithis]

For that kind of budget, I'd be looking at either second-hand boards or servers (check out the Dell T310s on ebay) that come with a 4 or 6 core Xeons and a decent amount of RAM.

[EndlessWaves]

I'm not a great fan of generic benchmarks like passmark. If you look at tests from similar areas like Cinebench R10 it shows your X3 720BE being around half the speed of a 3820QM laptop:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpu...ii-x3-720-be/9
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-C...r.73456.0.html

That's 50% faster than the passmark score would lead you to expect.

Your cheapest option CPU-wise is probably to replace your X3 with an X6 but 4GB DDR2 sticks were expensive last time I checked and if it's crashing you may have some faulty hardware in there.

Second choice is probably an Intel 2000 or 3000 series i5 or an AMD FX-83_0. You should be able to pick up a second hand setup including motherboard and DDR3 memory for within budget.

You could possibly look into the dual CPU xeon systems from the Core 2 era but I don't know how they'd compare.

[Terbinator]

Can't you pop a dedicated GPU in the build to blast through transcoding workloads?

[EndlessWaves]

Can't you pop a dedicated GPU in the build to blast through transcoding workloads?

You need a much bigger budget than £150 before OpenCL/CUDA is any faster than Quicksync.

[Dashers]

Buying new, the FX6-6300 seems like your best option.

But there are always bargains to have with second hand-kit and maybe refurbished.