Video card for video editing

Forum Graphics & Displays : Graphics Cards Video card for video editing

I am in the process of building a computer for video editing and need some assistance in choosing the video card. I have been using a Dell Precision T3400 with 8gb ram, a single quad core 2.86 processor, sata os and scracth disks and windows 7 ultimate. The new config will be 32gb ram, dual quad xeon processors 2.33 with 1333 bus, 4 15k sas drives in raid 10 config for os and scratch disk will be configured on an iscsi san with space allocated and spanned across 14 15k sas drives. I am curious as to what type of video card i should get. My budget is around $400. I am using Adobe Master Collection CS5 mostly Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects.

Reply to stevek1974

you're setting up 18, 15k sas drives and dual quad xeons and your budget for a workstation card is only $400? this is for video editing, eliminate the unnecessary and add in the relevant. you dont need 15k sas drives, or dual quad xeons. get a couple ssd's and a six core xeon. unless you're working for paramount and rendering a 120 minute movie with professional editing.... you don't need what you listed... it's just over-kill. i mean you're building a $10,000 machine right there and you're limiting yourself to 400 for a workstation card? what type of stuff are you rendering because i would recommend a nvidia quadro 4000+ if you're looking at that type of system. im honestly flabbergasted on how you planned on running this machine and limiting yourself to $400 for video.

Message edited by opexx on 04-21-2011 at 12:59:47 AM

Reply to opexx

I'm the IT manager for a company and we just did a $100k upgrade to our infrastructure. This left me with 2 servers that I could re-purpose. My current workstation is the Precision T3400. It is ok, but slow to render video projects. Since I had the hardware lying around, I thought I could utilize it to build myself a kick ass machine for editing. I don't have a ton of money in my budget since I already blew it all this year, but still need to do something to help with the video projects I have.

Message edited by stevek1974 on 04-21-2011 at 01:05:05 AM

Reply to stevek1974

Well honestly I would save up a bit 'till you can spend about $800 and get the quadro 4000. anything less is gonna be near useless. What you said makes a lot more sense though. I was blown away at the rest of the machine and your budget for a video card haha. Nvidia Quadro 4000 is the way to go. or higher if you can save up.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] dro%204000

Reply to opexx

Great thanks. From everything I read, it seemed as though the Quadro was the way to go. I have a Quadro FX 1700 in my machine now.

Reply to stevek1974

I think you mean the Quadro FX 1800 the quadro 4000 would be a crazy nice upgrade, over double the performance.

Reply to opexx

It lists it in the device manager as the fx 1700, so that is what I was going by.

Reply to stevek1974

just looked it up. yeah thats not uh.. thats not very good. haha. the quadro 4000 is as good as it gets. the next step up goes from $800 to $1,800. so yeah there ya go, quadro 4000 is what you want.

Reply to opexx