Kickass Video-editing machine on a budget (and using old bits)

[slay]

Hi there,

Have had a lot of stability problems with my LanParty NF Ultra2 board Rev A mobo. I do video editing as a hobby, and the onboard Highpoint controller, which seemed like a good idea at the time, keeps corrupting my disks. Its time for an upgrade!

However, I am pretty poor right now as the £1000 I had earmarked for this ended up being used to get my car past its MOT (its amazing how much it costs to replace a lightbulb these days).

So, I need to re-use some components to save money, and I came up with the following:

Case: Lian-Li alu job (existing)
Mobo: Asrock 755i65G or 755Dual-VSTA (£37.35)
CPU: Conroe 6600 (£217.95)
GPU: Gainward 7800GT AGP (existing)
Disks: PATA System disk Samsung Spinpoint ~120Gb (existing)
SATA data disk 400 Samsung Spinpoint SATA300 (£84.94)
DVD-ROM: NEC DVD Dual Layer ND-3520A, and Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-107D (existing)
Memory: 2Gb DDR400 (not sure of this, I hear the Asrock is not so flexible with this?) (~£200?)

Upgrade cost: ~£540


The Asrock seems like a good transition board, esp. since I bought (impulse buy!) an AGP 7800 GT quite recently. Want to get my money's worth if possible!

Questions for you hard-core modders:

Is Asrock a good choice for mobo? its cheap, thought I'd spend what I save on the CPU and maybe wait for the Asus-type mobos to be less than £100.

Will I have a fast enough machine to edit HD in the future, or is that Xeon minimum?

SATA v. PATA - any peeps out there with some real world Video Editing experience on this? Are there any gotchas or bandwidth issues? I dont know much about SATA yet.

The memory - I think I need a bit of advice on this. I got stung with the Lanparty before.

What do you guys think?

-Slay

[pp05]

Well plenty of memory, at least 1gig. Hard drive issue on top your internal disks, maybe get an external too for backup. Video editing is quite a mb killer.

But for video editing main thing is capture card isn't it?

[slay]

Damn, you are right. Clean forgot. Doesnt look like the Asrock has built-in Firewire either.

I do have a Rtx.10 card kicking around, removed it from the Lanparty as I thought it was causing the disk issues, or at least contributing to it. If thats not a good idea, will buy a Firewire card as well. The Camera I have is a Sony HDR-HC1E, I will capture in HDV, but probably downscale to SD for now.

I did specifiy 2Gb memory. Might even get 4Gb if funds allow.

cheers
-Slay

[slay]

PS. Any tips on outputing HD wmv on this sort of spec would be nice too, i know that Premiere uses a Cine-form add-on which lets me use lower-speed CPUs to play with HD. But any other ideas welcome.

[fuddam]

Cineform is excellent

firewire card is only 5 quid, so not going to bust your bank



2GB is fine. Even if you got 4GB, machine is not going to use it all for the NLE - max is 2GB per app.

I edit video professionally, and your machine sounds fine. SATA is def best way to go. Nothing like a SATA Raid 0 for speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed.

[slay]

fuddam,

Do you edit HDV? I want to know if this setup is powerful enough for it. I use premiere, but am not averse to using something else. currently the preview mode is a joke on my AMD2600 machine.

I wont be able to upgrade for at least another year. A lot can happen in a year!

cheers
-Slay

[slay]

Another thing I was confused about was what memory to get for the Asrock boards (either the 755i65g or the 755Dual-VSTA, apparently the former is better?).

DO i get DDR, DDR-2, is 400 what i want -which is PC3200 right? I must admit to being completely baffled by memory these days. I have tried to keep track, but I dont spend that much on my kit, so upgrading has been simple so far.

Has anyone got any advice?

cheers
Slay

[fuddam]

my home PC is an old 754 amd64 3000 here, and feeling the need to upgrade asap, since doing more compositing than ever.

that said, the cineform codec is the business for me, compared to true HDV. much smoother edit. Am aiming at a dual core which should make things even smoother



on a slower machine, no point in trying to edit hdv. just use a proxy, and sub in the real thing for final render. painless, aside from increased rendering in the end

[slay]

Ok did some reading, correct me if I am wrong:

DDR-400 is also PC3200, which runs ar 200Mhz
DDR2-667 is also PC5400 (or sometimes PC5300), which runs at 166Mhz(?)

both will work in the Asrock, but marginal difference in performance. I think.

this is crazy - havent even got to the SATA yet, which is:
SATA I, also known as SATA 1.5, and if you are really bored you can call it SATA150.

And apparently the Asrock only supports SATA I/1.5/150 - is this faster than a decent PATA133, and will it be OK for video capture?

Why so many names for the same bloody thing?

-Slay

[DanceswithUnix]

The type of memory you use makes very little difference. Having said that, if you are buying memory I would suggest DDR2 for the simple reason that there is far greater chance you can use it in your next motherboard purchase.

Note there is a Nero Recode benchmark on that link that shows less than 4% mpeg compression time difference from the slowest DDR to the fastest DDR2.

The SATA stuff isn't quite as bad as it sounds. Again, it frankly just doesn't matter in terms of performance as a single drive only manages about 60MB/sec at best, so whether you couple it up with PATA-100 or SATA300 is changing nothing. The confusion over SATA-2 is down to the fact that there is no such standard, just some marketing talk. There are 2 speeds: 150 or 300, and some options such as NCQ (native command queueing, most people turn that off).

Generally there is no downside to SATA, and again it is the latest and therefore most futureproof.

[fuddam]

agreed with Dances. MORE ram is more important than type of ram, and why not get the latest for futureproofing?

agreed also about SATA. Any config is better than none, and RAID 0 Sata is currently the fastest way to go

[slay]

Thanks for the sane, if hedged, advice. ;-)

And I see your point now. the real frustration is, there is no such thing as 'futureproofinng'.

Put it another way. Asssuming you do a major upgrade once a year, what thing have you bought recently thats future proofed? No one trusted SATA, as it was new. I have at least 6 HDD which are PATA from all my video editing tasks (1 disk per job, until recently, when capacities went up). Mobos? Ho - take your pick - even if you stuck with your fave CPU producer, there was no way you could future-proof it - its not the its fault, its dealing with different CPU footprints, different memory, different ATA and graphics interfaces. Not to mention BIOS that didnt have a chance. And as for the DVD hardware, well, whatever I buy now will be useless in 6 months when HD becomes mainstream.

Sorry, didnt mean to make this into a rant, but I realise the futility of futureproofing unless you upgrade every 6 months. Which kind of goes against the concept of futureproofing in the first place. Is everyone really that deluded - or rich?

Which is why I like the Asrock people. With their mobo, I get what I really need (Intel Duo 2 CPU power) without having to buy:

1) New memory (unless I want to)
2) New disks (unless I want to)
3) New SATA DVD-RW (unless I want to)
4) New PCI-E graphics cards (unless I want to)

So yes, thanks for making up my mind.

PS. I'll re-use my old PC3200/DDR400/whatever-other-name-exists-for-it memory and save a further 200 quid - so, 300 quid for Intel Duo 2 - hooray!

-Slay

[DanceswithUnix]

I am sure you will be very happy with that setup, and yes the Asrock boards are superb for upgrades.

As for your hard drives, you could always buy a few IDE to SATA converters if you run out of IDE ports.

If you did want futureproofing, then I would have suggested an AMD AM2 socket motherboard. That is what I bought last time, but for that machine I was much more bothered about component availability in a couple of years than performance. I think you need performance now, not in a year

[slay]

DWU

The real irony is that I work in IT, mainly Solaris unix however, but I should know everything about this, but I'm not ashamed to say that I dont.

Its just changed too rapidly over the last 2 years. Its not as if I could not afford an upgrade every year, but its exciting times and you cant rely on your AMD being king in 3 months, never mind half a year or, heavens forbid, an entire year before upgrading! Nor any of the other technologies or interfaces.

DDR->DDR2, PATA-SATA, SATA->SATA300, AGP->PCI-X, Socket X to Socket Y (lets not go into that one), and I forgot power supplies, which for some reason cost £80 for a decent one. I dont even go into niceties like ViVO and the rest. Mind you, i guess thats why a DELL costs £400 rather than £2000.

Bouyant market and competition only exist when there are punters who need something better. American economic model. 'dont worry about initial layout cost, or even compatibility, if its good people will buy enough of it to make you a load of cash. invest and reapply philosophy.'

Swings and roundabouts.
-Slay

[DanceswithUnix]

I know what you mean, I am an electronics engineer (I design stuff, I don't repair washing machines) which helps in keeping up but things have moved fast recently.

Looks like on the horizon we have DDR3 memory support from AMD, the next revision of PCI-Express and for some reason no-one seems to explain Direct-X 10 graphics cards (as far as I can make out they double power consumption but I can't find an up side).

Mind you, for me the next generation wireless broadband is coming too slowly, my ADSL is rubbish

[slay]

DWU,

Ordered the bits through Scan:
Asrock 755Dual-VSTA
Conroe 6600
400 Gb SATA

Still waiting for 'next day' delivery! Grrr! i really dont like citylink.

Will the converter you provided (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=176415) be fast enough to allow for video-editing? Does it introduce any lag?

Also, I wanted an Icy Dock solution for the data disk, but cant work out from the Scan website, if they have a SATA one - if I do a search on scan, I dont see it (well there is a x3 solution), if I do a search on google, I see it advertised on scan!

cheers
Slay