[Homebuild] High End Consumer Video Editing Platform

[Parmeniooo]

I've been given a soft budget of $3,000(USD) and am attempting to ensure that I don't miss something valuable for a video editing platform. This is supposed to be the 'first system' for a bootstrapped video editing company. I've built a few mid-range platforms for myself in the past, but I'm unsure if there's any specialty hardware that I should look into for a purpose built rig such as this.

Here's what I've got: Baseline rig

In order to keep everything in the budget I've pulled dollars out of RAM, monitors, and harddrives. I feel that these are the easiest to upgrade incrementally and do the least damage by going a bit smaller to begin with. However, I absolutely admit that I'm not familiar with the operating profiles of Adobe Premier and am absolutely open to moving the dollars around.

I'm hoping to get this build underway in the next week or two.

Thanks

 

[WithoutWeakness]

It's a great start but there are definitely a few things that should be changed around.

I'm not sure that motherboard is the best choice for the intended purpose. At $380 it's offering a ton of functionality however half of those features will likely never be used. There are boards in the $250-$275 range that will do just as well for video editing. ASUS's P9X79 Pro is the highest I'd go for and it's around the $320 mark. That extra $60 can be put toward better components in other categories.

The MSI Lightning 7970 cards are great for gaming but will perform horribly for video rendering in Premiere Pro compared to Nvidia's cards. Premiere Pro offers extensive GPU acceleration using Nvidia's CUDA architecture, however it does not offer any OpenCL acceleration for AMD cards. AMD's GPU's can't touch Nvidia's for Premiere Pro. Dual GPU's also can not be fully utilized on a hardware level by Premiere Pro. The GTX 680 is not fully supported yet and currently offers rendering speeds comparable to the GTX 580 in Premiere Pro. With that said, After Effects recently received an update to support the GTX 680 so it's highly likely that an update for Premiere Pro is around the corner. Grab a single GTX 680 and put the extra $500 toward more storage or some higher-end monitors.

1050 watts is great for 3 GPU's. Crazy overkill for what you need though. Assuming we're dropping to one power-efficient GTX 680 we can drop down to a solid 550-600 watt unit. 80+ Gold units can be found for ~$70 in this price range and Platinum units can be found as low as $100. More dollars freed up that we can re-purpose elsewhere.

The monitors are too low resolution at 1600x900. If it's for video editing you'll want at least 1920x1080, higher if it can be reached within the budget. Using money from changing out other parts will easily net you a pair of quality 1920x1080 or higher screens.

4x4GB sticks would be preferable to 2x8GB sticks on X79. Quad channel operation will give you faster RAM performance. 32GB (4x8GB) may be overkill but can easily be done by shuffling around the dollars elsewhere.

"CPU Cooler" is listed down bottom even though you've chosen the NH-D14 up top (though it was likely a placeholder for the NH-D14)

Good luck with this thing!

 

[Parmeniooo]

I appreciate the feedback!

So, I've swapped over to the GTX 680, moved over to significantly better monitors, picked up 3 2TB barracudas on sale at NewEgg, and decided on a bit more memory.

I do hate giving up the dual video cards, but you're very likely right that the $500 could be much better used elsewhere.

With the sale, I'm looking at this as a possible case, but it looks a bit silly as a professional case.

What do you think about that amount of RAM? I could pump some more into the rig and get it up to the board max, but I'm not certain that there'd be any gains realized for the cost.