Final specs for video editing rig

[Wonderwill]

Here they are:
Processor- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz $224.90
Fan/heatsink- ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler $34.99
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound $5.99

RAM- G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory $109.99

Motherboard- GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 (rev. 1.3) LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard $99.99

Hard Drive- Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive $154.99

Graphics Card- EVGA 128-P2-N441-LX GeForce 7300GT 128MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card $59.99

Sound Card- Creative Sound Blaster SB0570 Audigy SE 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Interface Sound Card $29.99

Case-COOLER MASTER Elite 330 RC-330-KKN1-GP Black SECC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case $39.99

Dvd Drive- SAMSUNG Black 18X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X 2MB Cache IDE DVD Burner with LightScribe and Software $32.99

PSU- FSP Group (Fortron Source) AX400-PN, RoHS, 12cm FAN, version 2.2, 2 SATA, 20+ 4 pin, PCI Express, 400W Power Supply $43.99

Total: $837.80 +shipping-rebates

I do have a couple things to clear up before ordering. Will the sound card even be better than the onboard? Also, will the RAM have any troubles with this mobo? Any ideas or comments to save money or increase speed will be accepted.

 

[4745454b]

I'm torn on the soundcard. On the one hand, it isn't really needed for the computer. Edit video isn't going to be impacted by the audio. On the other hand, you aren't skimping on anything, and its only $30. You have a dual core 4MB L2 cache C2D, 2GBs of ram, and a raptor, so if you can afford the soundcard your not hurting the primary purpose of the computer.

Other then that, its looks pretty good. I might drop the soundcard and get another harddrive. 74GBs is going to fill up fast. You also might want to consider getting a quadcore CPU, but that will bump up the price quite a bit.

 

[Wonderwill]

Oh I didn't mention that I'm building it for someone else who has a HUGE external hard drive that she can put video on when she's finished editing it-that's the main reason I didn't get a 500 Gig hd to go along with it. As for the soundcard, I just found a cheap one that may or may not matter. She did want something a little better than onboard because her job includes audio editing also.

 

[4745454b]

Well you didn't say that....

In which case I'd say your perfect. You didn't pick a CPU that is to weak, and you didn't pick a video card that is to strong. Good job, looks like its a good build.

 

[robwright]

Ditto, good build all around. I'd go with the sound card, personally, since it's not much extra.

Oh I didn't mention that I'm building it for someone else who has a HUGE external hard drive that she can put video on when she's finished editing it-that's the main reason I didn't get a 500 Gig hd to go along with it.

Yeah, that would have been my only gripe with the system, but if you have a big external drive then you're fine. We have a similar setup here at the THG lab with our video editing PC, which is an Intel quad core with 2 GB or RAM.

I'm curious, what video editing softwareare you getting?

 

[blunc]

I would still recommend a second internal drive of 200 to 300gb size for her to keep project files on till the edits are complete. There are two reasons for this; 1. most NLE programs recommend having a second drive for project files and 2. if the main drive (where the editing programs reside) dies then she will not have lost all the work done on her projects.

I personally have experienced reason #2.

 

[Wonderwill]

With her old compaq she was stuck using Pinnacle Studio 10 for everything, but now with this comp she will be getting one form of Avid (xpress, liquid, etc.) or another.

@Blunc: I did try and convince her to get a 320GB Barracuda, but she didn't think it was reasonable, and didn't want to spend the extra money. :?

 

[flasher702]

Here they are:
Processor- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz $224.90

decent enough choice

Fan/heatsink- ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler $34.99

also decent but stock cooling should also be fine. Save you a bit of money.

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound $5.99

shin estu will last longer, or the stock TIM with the stock HS should be fine and save you a few $

RAM- G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory $109.99

For video editing you should consider more ram and faster (that is: lower latency) ram. I'm a little outside of my realm of expertise here but i think 4gb of low-latency RAM should be seriously considered to help manipulate large video files. DDR2-667 is also perfectly ok if you see a good deal.

Motherboard- GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 (rev. 1.3) LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard $99.99

decent choice

Hard Drive- Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive $154.99

For video editing an array of 4 cheap 40gb HDs in RAID-0 will kick the crap out of that Raptor. 2x the storage and ~3x the sequential read/write performance. Same price. You'll quickly run out of video editing space on a puty 74g drive anyway. If you have money to blow I'd say get both and run your OS from the raptor and use the array for storage and video editing scratch disk. Use the raptor for your regular paging file.

Graphics Card- EVGA 128-P2-N441-LX GeForce 7300GT 128MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card $59.99

Should be fine. Could probably get something cheaper too.

Sound Card- Creative Sound Blaster SB0570 Audigy SE 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Interface Sound Card $29.99

You don't need this. Spend the money on RAM and/or HDs

Case-COOLER MASTER Elite 330 RC-330-KKN1-GP Black SECC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case $39.99

no comment

Dvd Drive- SAMSUNG Black 18X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X 2MB Cache IDE DVD Burner with LightScribe and Software $32.99

I'd say stick with an IDE one just to keep your sata ports free for the RAID array I suggested, but get something that supports Dual Layer and and -R disks. If you want to backup raw files to DVD you may want DL and there should be plenty of choices that support DL and +-.

PSU- FSP Group (Fortron Source) AX400-PN, RoHS, 12cm FAN, version 2.2, 2 SATA, 20+ 4 pin, PCI Express, 400W Power Supply $43.99

I love my Seasonic S12s so far. While the FSP Group PSUs are generally considered to be solid units they are still low-end units with sub-par efficiency ratings.

Total: $837.80 +shipping-rebates

I do have a couple things to clear up before ordering. Will the sound card even be better than the onboard?

no

Also, will the RAM have any troubles with this mobo?

no. Any DDR2-800 or DDR2-667 will work fine

Any ideas or comments to save money or increase speed will be accepted.

Raid Array, no sound card, Cheaper GFX card (do not enable turbo cache though), more RAM

 

[flasher702]

As for the soundcard, I just found a cheap one that may or may not matter. She did want something a little better than onboard because her job includes audio editing also.

Soundcard shouldn't affect audio editing as the editing is all done in the CPU. Maybe audio recording or high-end audio playback. If she's just editing sound files the integrated will work perfectly. If she's doing more than that she should consider a much, much higher end sound card with a digital breakout box to ensure that there is no interference. Also, it's very easy to add one in later if the integrated turns out to not be good enough for her.

 

[blunc]

too bad...

I guess she will have to learn the hard way.

 

[rockyjohn]

Hard Drive- Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive $154.99

For video editing an array of 4 cheap 40gb HDs in RAID-0 will kick the crap out of that Raptor. 2x the storage and ~3x the sequential read/write performance. Same price. You'll quickly run out of video editing space on a puty 74g drive anyway. If you have money to blow I'd say get both and run your OS from the raptor and use the array for storage and video editing scratch disk. Use the raptor for your regular paging file.

How will four 40GB HD in RAID-0 have twice the storage of a 74GB Raptor?
I think you have it backwards. Your suggsted array will only provide half the storage.

 

[kahuna1]

i think RAID-0 spreads the files out over all 4 drives. Maybe you are thinking of RAIDs that use half the space to mirror, or backup your files. In RAID-0 there is no backup.

 

[flasher702]

Hard Drive- Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive $154.99

For video editing an array of 4 cheap 40gb HDs in RAID-0 will kick the crap out of that Raptor. 2x the storage and ~3x the sequential read/write performance. Same price. You'll quickly run out of video editing space on a puty 74g drive anyway. If you have money to blow I'd say get both and run your OS from the raptor and use the array for storage and video editing scratch disk. Use the raptor for your regular paging file.

How will four 40GB HD in RAID-0 have twice the storage of a 74GB Raptor?
I think you have it backwards. Your suggsted array will only provide half the storage.
Uh... it'll be 160gb raid array. RAID-0 is striped, no redundancy. A 0+1 array would be 80gb with mirroring. A raid 1 array with two spare drives would be 40gb.

 

[aBg_rOnGak]

I agree with Flasher702. Your friend definitely need as much and as fast RAM as possible. Ugh, Please try to convince her about a bigger additional hard drive (just afraid current hard disks won't be sufficient for temp files), but oh well, I'm not very familiar with Avid

 

[rockyjohn]

I stand corrected. Yes it would be 160GB of storage. Thank you.

 

[Wonderwill]

I agree with Flasher702. Your friend definitely need as much and as fast RAM as possible. Ugh, Please try to convince her about a bigger additional hard drive (just afraid current hard disks won't be sufficient for temp files), but oh well, I'm not very familiar with Avid

She will be using XP MCE so I think anything above 3 GB is a waste-and it would also be a waste to use up all of the RAM slots with 64-bit right around the corner. So we decided on 2 Gigs of fast RAM for now. The HD has plenty of space for the 1 hour long movie she is buying it for also. It's not like another drive is impossible to get later-it was pretty much a budget constraint.

 

[flasher702]

Adding more RAM later should be quite easy, yes.

You should still consider a raid array instead though. There's a Tom's article around here somewhere "cheap raid ravages raptor" or something like that. The raptors have impressively low latency but their sustained read and write speeds aren't much better than the average drive. Even a 2 or 3 drive RAID-0 array would be an improvement and it could cost less.

 

[Wonderwill]

Update:

We kept all the same specs as above but ended up adressing the storage space problem. We chose a $60 western digital caviar 250 gig (16 mb cache, 7200 RPM...you know which one it is) Instead of constantly using an external, we chose this. The thing is, she already ordered the 74 gig raptor and on top of that I have no idea how to setup raid beyond 2 drives-and I don't think it would be much better than what we have. We are talking milliseconds of latency and access time aren't we?

 

[flasher702]

Update:

We kept all the same specs as above but ended up adressing the storage space problem. We chose a $60 western digital caviar 250 gig (16 mb cache, 7200 RPM...you know which one it is) Instead of constantly using an external, we chose this. The thing is, she already ordered the 74 gig raptor and on top of that I have no idea how to setup raid beyond 2 drives-and I don't think it would be much better than what we have. We are talking milliseconds of latency and access time aren't we?

...sustained read/write speed. No one listens to me Latency doesn't matter much when you're doing sequential reads and writes of multiple gigs of data. The raptor will show almost no advantage over an average drive for sustained read/write and will get pwned in the face, hardcore, against a hardware raid-0 array. Check here: http://storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php You'll notice several other SATA drives beating the Raptor 74g at maximum read speed. You'll also notice that two of the very worst drives in the list will basically match a 74g raptor for read speed if you put them in raid-0. Look here: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/12/cheap_raid_ravages_wd_raptor/ Even the 150gb Raptor (which is a different, faster design, not just bigger capacity, as you can see in the benchmarks at storagereview.com) gets spanked by a 2-disk raid-0 array.

The motherboard you selected supports raid-0 doesn't it? You just pick what disks you want to raid from the raid-controller's BIOS menu.

It would not be advisable to raid those two drives together if that's what you're asking though. Can you return the raptor? There are competing products that are simply faster than the 74g one while having several times as much storage and costing slightly less (storagereview.com has a real-time price check feature, just scroll down the list to the 74g raptor for whichever benchmark, then scroll up and check prices on SATA drives that were faster than it). The 74g raptor is a rather old design. Deskstar 7K500 500GB Hard Drive
Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 500GB Hard Drive $136 from zipzoomfly for example. http://storagereview.com/php/benchmark/suite_v4.php?typeID=10&testbedID=4&osID=6&raidconfigID=1&numDrives=1&devID_0=325&devID_1=324&devID_2=307&devID_3=306&devCnt=4 A couple 250gb ones in raid-0 and you're looking at ~2x the performance for the same price with 6 times as much capacity.

It will, of course, work fine with the OS installed on the raptor and the other drive for storage. I was just trying to point out that you could get more capacity and performance for reading and writing large files for the same or less money.

 

[4745454b]

I wouldn't worry to much about the AID0 array. Most of the work will be done with the CPU and RAM anyways, so this isn't a deal breaker. Yes, setting up an AID0 array for this will be faster, but we aren't talking minutes instead of hours.

Before you start believing those "benchmarks", realise that nearly all of them are for synthetic apps. I didn't see any winzip or actual read/writes in those reviews. Plenty of synthetic crap that paints a rosey picture for the Rapture and the AID0 arrays, but nothing from real programs. (before you start telling me that synthetic apps are just as good, go look at how well the AMD HD2900 looks if you look at only 3Dmark. Beats the 8800GTX, but can bearly tie the 8800GTS in real programs.)

 

[flasher702]

I wouldn't worry to much about the AID0 array. Most of the work will be done with the CPU and RAM anyways, so this isn't a deal breaker. Yes, setting up an AID0 array for this will be faster, but we aren't talking minutes instead of hours.

Before you start believing those "benchmarks", realise that nearly all of them are for synthetic apps. I didn't see any winzip or actual read/writes in those reviews. Plenty of synthetic crap that paints a rosey picture for the Rapture and the AID0 arrays, but nothing from real programs.

They measured real IOPS for a few games and WinZIP would be a CPU benchmark, not a HD benchmark. IOmeter traffic patterns simulate real traffic and give real IOPS scores, not synthetic scores. The two SYSmark benchmarks are synthetic tests with synthetic scores. The rest are real.

The HD you use shouldn't affect encoding or video manipulation at all (if it does you need more RAM not a faster HD). It will just affect the opening and saving of files. The faster this is the more frequently users will save checkpoints in their work and the less time they'll spend waiting for it to save making them more efficient. For video editing you can easily end up in situations where you're seeking through several gigs of data and loading hundreds of megabytes into memory at a time and then saving off several gig files every time major changes have been made. It sounds like your user isn't used to working with large chunks of video at a time but as soon as they get used to having a much faster processor they will want to And there is no additional upfront cost. In fact, compared to the uber-expensive raptor series, it could actually cost less.

You wanted to know where to save money, that HD has a giant bull's eye on it.