Lenovo ThinkStation D20 for Video editing with Windows live movie maker ?

GARBITZDIE,

A Lenovo ThinkStation D20 with two hyperthreading 4-core 2.8 / 3.2GHz Xeons should have reasonably good performance and excellent reliability for Video editing with Windows Live Movie Maker. The 64GB of RAM is really good as well. I use an LGA1366 system of a similar vintage (Dell Precision T5500 with 2X Xeon X5680/ 48GB / Quadro K2200 4GB) for rendering and still have my previous rendering system, a Precision T5400 with 2X Xeon X5460 / 16GB, and Quadro FX4800 1.5GB. The FX 5800 was one the best GPU's for it's time- $1,300 new- but today can be surpassed by a $175 Quadro K620 2GB. The FX4800 produces a Passmark average 3D score of 987 and a K620 average 2263.

Still, without trying to upset everything, if there is to be a dedicated system for video editing, it may be worth considering using Adobe Premiere Elements as the program. I've never used Windows Live Movie Maker but comments suggest it's easy to use but not very robust- crashes more often than it should. But, Adobe Premiere is a long-standing professional standard, and the Elements version works similarly but with fewer of the professional features. It's not expensive- you an get Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements for under $110 It seems that it would be more forward-looking approach to learn Premiere Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements as investing the learning curve time towards a future sue of the full capabilities of the full versions.

As fro the system, there has a been a big decrease in the cost of certain Xeon E5-2600 series 8-cores- the E5-2670 and E5-2680 in particular which is a 2.7 / 3.5 GHz and these can cost only $60-80. Having a dual Xeon E5 / LGA2011 system would offer a higher CPU performance- plus an SATA III 6GB/s disk system and USB 3- also be a forward looking tactic to find a low specification dual LGA2011 CPU system- Dell Precision T5600 or T7600 or HP z620 and replace the CPU with an E5-2670 or E5-2680. It possible to start with a single 8-core and that provides the same number of threads as the Lenovo's two 4-cores. In the future if necessary, add the 2nd CPU to have 16-cores/ 32 threads- double the Levono. This would be somewhat more expensive than the D20, but surprisingly not a lot more- a basic, working T5600 or z620 can be a $500-600 purchase. Have 16GB RAM, a 120GB SSD / 1TB WD Blue and used GTX 750 Ti and that system will have higher performance and be useful for a longer period as it can be upgraded to a higher professional standard than the D20 which is limited to a 6-core maximum.

Cheers,

BambiBoom