Video Editing/Film Production PC advice on proposed build...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I do not see why you HAVE to go for a Q6700 if the Phenom II will do the job and will do it faster while consuming less power. Unless you have evidence that the Q6*** will run the software better it sounds like you are going for something that is more expensive but slower will consuming less power.

Most of the video encoding benchmarks in the reviews I have listed have shown the Phenom II X4 920 to be faster than the Q6700 and Q9300. The fact is that looking at the software companies website they have only tested it on some workstations which are made by Dell and HP

I remember at work we needed some imaging software which was £4k+ and we ran it on a spec the company had not used it on before. The company was quite interested in this and gave as free software updates for life as a result(they added the computer spec to the tested systems page). Unless it is stated it will NOT run on a piece of specific hardware then it will work as the companies usually cannot be bothered to test every single piece of hardware out there. In theory you should only stock to the workstation they have used then.


Also you are forgetting that the AMD motherboards are cheaper for the features they offer. Hence a Q6700+ cooler+ P45 motherboard will cost you £235 whereas the Phenom II X2 920 + 780G/780V/8200/8300 will cost under £230. The 790GX/790FX/790X only really offer features which would be of no use in this build.

[Nobull]

This is a tough one for me to decide because over at the Avid forums they seem to stress quite vehemently that the further you stray from the product specifications the more problems you'll face. The consensus seems to be that AMD CPUs are "a gamble" i.e. that theres a chance they won't run the program and obviously my mate would be pretty peeved if I built this and it didnt work for his uses

In terms of the graphics card, again I'm aware of the fact that the Quadro card performance is poor for the cost and that cheaper cards are more powerful. Its just I would feel really bad if we put the system together only to find it wouldn't run with the graphics card I picked out for him. I'm going to do a bit more research into whether the 8800GS will run Avid.

Thanks again for your time guys.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I looked at some of the posts on the forum. Have any of them actually used any modern AMD processors?? It strikes me as they were using older AMD processors which did not support SSE2 and SSE3 which lead to problems as the latest versions of the software needed them.

It does seem quite a buggy piece of software (regarding hardware though). If you really want to play it safe I would go for the Q8200 as it supports SSE4.1 which could be supported by future versions of the software and the Quadro graphics card . Whether it will be fastest machine for the money though is debatable.

[cptwhite_uk]

I take it you were standing on your head when you wrote all those 9's? (a Q9700 would be a sight to behold...)

Oops! Q6700

[Nobull]

This issue is just getting more confusing the more I look into it. Phenom II works for this one guy over at the Avid forums, have found non who say it doesn't. But he is only 1 source. Also it seems the Nvidia 8800GT (£35 cheaper than the Quadro FX 570 posted in original spec and much more powerful) will work fine with the odd simple change of setting (confirmed by several sources) so now I'm not exactly sure what to do so I'm going to tell my friend the pros and cons of each route and let him decide, its his money afterall

What my question at this point is IF PROVISIONALLY I decide to go down this route...will the Coolermaster eXtreme Power 460W be sufficient for a system with 2 HDDs, an 8800GT AND a Phenom II X4 and if not can someone recommend something that might be more suitable at the ~£40 price mark? Bearing in mind the Coolermaster PSU does come with a pretty decent case for only £53 and I don't really want to have to spend more than that in total on a case & psu combination. As I said earlier case aesthetics mean nothing to him and cooling isn't a massive concern as there will BE ABSOLUTELY NO OVERCLOCKING.

Cheers for all your input so far this has been slightly mind boggling having to delve into forums for a piece of software I know nothing about!! Sheesh and I'm not even getting paid. He is a good friend tho!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Costing the provisional build:
1.)Phenom II X4 920 ~ £160 to £165
2.)8gb DDR2 ~ £70
3.)WD 640gb hard disk ~ £55
4.)9800GT(the same card as a 8800GT but renamed) ~ £80
5.)780G/780V/8200/8300 motherboard - under £65
6.)DVD writer ~ £15
7.)Silverpower 400w ~ £35
8.)el-cheapo case ~£10 to £15


A review of the PSU:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16073/11

TBH even the original case and PSU will do the job fine.

The 400w PSU in my SD37P2 is running a 975x motherboard,a Q6600 running at 3ghz,4gb of RAM,two hard disks,a dvd writer and HD4830 fine. Remember that the quality of the PSU is more important than the wattage.

[CooperXS]

Are you speaking from personal experience? On the Avid specification it says it only "officially" supports Quadro cards, and specifically says only compatible with NVidia. Won't be overclocking as I'm too inexperienced to do it on someone elses machine. Havn't tried a RAID 0 set up yet either any help on that? Thanks for the response

I overlooked the AVID part, sorry
I've been using Sony Vegas with NVidia 7300GT and AMD X2. GPU makes no difference in really, unless you want to preview full HD or maybe even two streams Then again HD 4330 costs pennies and copes with dual FullHD streams easily.
Another thing some video editors may have built-in or available through plugins certain filters running on GPU during rendering process, thus dhrinking the final cut times quite drastically. I had a pleasure of using some on Vegas and 7300GT gave 5-8 times speed boost over 2.7GHz X2. Though these plugins are not cheap. Not sure about the current situation though - I was messing with vegas like 2 years ago.
As for hardware support take Adobe for example. They simply dont mention AMD name at all saying Intel xx GHz or similar. Pure marketing BS
All PC software (generaly speaking) is x86 compliant and will run on any CPY be it Intel, AMD or even Via

[Nobull]

Thanks for the help guys. Nice 1 well I'll look into that. I was thinking of that very same silverpower PSU. Shame theres no Today Only offers on PSUs like there was last week, they had some corkers. I'll discuss which route we're going down with my mate ASAP then post up a final revised spec for y'all to have a gander at before I buy purchase the bits. Regards.

[arthurleung]

I would say ignore any of those "uncompressed AVI" non-sense. I've used Lagarith codec (or HuffYUV, depending on type of source). For processor intensive filters, the processor cost for compression/decompression is so small it doesn't make any impact to speed, but save you 30~90% of space. For non-processor intensive edits, compressed to lossless means the random access is way faster.

Also, get a larger drive for the lower cost per GB of space.