Video Editing/Film Production PC finalised spec

[Nobull]

Ok so here's the finalised spec. for that Video Editing PC. Just need a few last minute opinions to confirm before I buy the bits (preferably tonight)

CPU: Phenom II 920 -- £160
MOBO: ASUS M3A78-EM --£63
GPU: Nvidia Quadro FX 560 £25 (off ebay)
RAM: 4GB Corsair TwinX 800mhz CL5 (x2) i.e. 8GB of RAM...is CL4 worth the extra £s considering I wont be overclocking?
PSU: Silverpower 400W. Totted up the max needed using a PSU calculator (all settings on 100% TDP) which came to ~315W I've heard you add 15% to that so 400W should do fine
Case: Xclio CoolBox Black £20 (on today only)
DVDRW: Samsung 22x DVDRW £15.50
HDDs: 160GB & 640GB Hitachis £72 (today only)

OS: Vista Ultimate 64bit (already got)

Thoughts?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would go for Samsung or Western Digital hard drives personally. I had some bad experiences with IBM and Hitachi drives in the past - YMMV!

Apart from that it looks fine.

[Nobull]

Helpful as always Cat. Advice taken and duely noted. I'm switching to a 160GB Western Digital drive for the primary HD and considering a Samsung 500GB for the secondary.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would look at getting a slightly faster system drive or one with at least 16mb cache. In my limited experience of video editing I would say that the packages I have used have certainly pushed the hard drive.

[!TIMMY!]

I would change the 640gb hard drive to a Samsung F1 (2 platters and very quiet); and buy some Corsair 1066mhz 5-5-5-15 ram:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/s...tml?CSR-8500C5

£79.32 for 8gb (free del over £50).

[Pob255]

I'd agree with Cat here, fast, high cache drive for primary system & software, actually both if possible.
The thing to remember is that when you edit video, you are working on the uncompressed video files so they are large and will be using a good chunk of virtual memory.

[arthurleung]

I'd agree with Cat here, fast, high cache drive for primary system & software, actually both if possible.
The thing to remember is that when you edit video, you are working on the uncompressed video files so they are large and will be using a good chunk of virtual memory.

Programs usually cache up to 30 frames, which is only 210MB with 1080p footage.
It DOESN'T use a lot of virtual memory. And that is the same for video, uncompressed or not. It always get uncompressed in memory.
I've worked with 1080p video editing over GbE which is not a problem, the video editing program will handle the caching.

Video processing is NOT a high demand and you can always get around harddrive/network speed limit by compression (lossless or not)
Unless you multi-process 1080p footages (like 3 of them at the same time to use up 100% CPU), you are unlikely to need >4GB of ram.

I rarely see the point buying a 160GB harddrive specifically for the OS drive, might as well spend some more on a SSD, or a large drive >=1TB which is cheaper per GB.

[Nobull]

Thanks for the input guys. Reason I'm putting 2 drives in is aparently Avid doesn't recognise partitions?! Consensus on the Avid forums was that 2 physical drives are needed at a minimum. Cheers again.