Decent Set Up? Opinions

[Henry Spencer]

Hello

After toiling away with my substandard system for about a year, I have decided to splash all of my cash on a new set up. But now as my finger hovers precariously over the 'pay' button, my stomach twists into knots and I worry whether I need to spend as much as I am

I know when it comes to building a PC and editing, there is no end to how much it is possible to spend, but I would like to get an idea from your good selves as to whether the system I'm about to build is possibly 'over doing it' so to speak

I'm building from scratch and the grand total for the items I have amassed is just a shade under £1000. I’m going to be editing HDV footage from my Sony HVR-A1. I’m hoping to start using After Effects in the future (as soon as I learn how to use it), and I’m creating shorts in the region of 5 to 20 minutes. I’ll be running Adobe Premiere, After Effects (hopefully), and Cubase, Reason 4 etc on 64bit Windows 7.

Here is a list of the items:

- 6GB (3x2GB) Corsair Dominator DDR3, PC3-12800 (1600), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 8, DHX, XMP

- Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R, SLi, Intel X58 Express, S1366, PCI-E 2.0x16, DDR3 1333, SATA 3Gb/s, SATA RAID

- CiT 2036 Black Midi ATX Case Inc 450W PSU

- 896MB Gainward GTX260 Golden Smple 55nm, 2200MHz GDDR3, GPU 625MHz, Shader 1242MHz, 216 Cores

- Intel i7 920, D0 SLBEJ S1366, Bloomfield, 2.66 GHz, QPI 4.8GT/s, 8MB Cache, 20x Ratio, 130W, Retail

- 500 GB Western Digital WD5000AADS Caviar Green, SATA 3Gb/s, IntelliPower, 32MB Cache, NCQ

- 24" Acer V243HBD Black Full HD 1080P, Widescreen LCD, 1920x1080, 40,000:1 DCR, 300 cd/m², 2ms,VESA

- LG CH08LS10.AUAR 8x Blu-Ray Reader & DVDRW - 16x DVD±R, 8x +RW, 6x -RW, 5x RAM, 4Mb Buf

In addition to this, I already have 1TB external hard drive and a fire wire card.

Are there any places you think where I may have gone overboard or do you think this is about right? I guess one of the things I don’t know enough about is the graphics card. When doing some shopping I saw that a lot of money can be spent here so I opted for card I felt may be good, but won’t break the bank; any thoughts on the choice? Any items one could downgrade and save a bit of cash?
I appreciate any feedback you are able to offer?
Thank you in advance.

 

[CDCosta]

that machine is overboard for what your doing. You need a bigger PSU and make sure your mobo can use 1600 ram.

 

[Henry Spencer]

that machine is overboard for what your doing. You need a bigger PSU and make sure your mobo can use 1600 ram.

thank you for your feedback

I suspected I was going a little bit overboard; are you able to offer any suggestions as to a set up that would be more appropriate?

 

[Thom 98]

I recently bought a similar system to yours and it absolutely rocks! However, I'd really suggest getting 2 more TBs of internal storage (I have two Samsung HD103SJ). Editing from an external drive sucks and you really don't want to USB/Firewire port to be the bottleneck with such a system! Also, getting two drives, will let you mirror them (either via Raid 1 or just use a tool like SyncToy like I do) for backup. That way, if one drive fails, you still have all your files.

About the graphics card: Are you using AE CS4 or CS3? If you have CS4, I'd suggest getting a good graphics card by NVidia (about 150 bucks should be fine) to take advantage of the new CUDA-stuff. That way, your rendertimes will greatly decrease.
If you're sill on CS3, I wouldn't bother too much about the graphics. Just get something cheap, doesn't really matter that much.

Other than that, you're gonna love the new system!

 

[Beeblebrox]

However, I'd really suggest getting 2 more TBs of internal storage (I have two Samsung HD103SJ). Editing from an external drive sucks and you really don't want to USB/Firewire port to be the bottleneck with such a system!

I agree about shifting some of your resources to storage. But I'd go external, not internal. Get a RAID enclosure with an eSATA interface and you'll have plenty of bandwidth to edit HDV.

 

[Will Vincent]

I'd suggest no less than an 800watt power supply... the rest of the specs look decent... With a nice cpu cooler you can overclock that i7 chip to almost 4GHz on air cooling alone. If you go the water cooling route I believe people are running in the neighborhood of 4.5GHz with that chip.

You might want to consider something other than that Western Digital "Green" drive.. the speed stepping it does could be a potential problem, and will likely become a bottleneck. You're better off spending a little more and getting a 7200rpm sata drive, than whatever the small price break there is currently on that variable speed green drive.

I wouldn't worry too much about it being overkill. With a bigger power supply to handle all the power requirements in stride, with proper care and feeding this kind of machine should easily last you several years, and it's got plenty of horsepower for HD and whatnot.

 

[Henry Spencer]

Thank you very much for your replies; your advice in much appreciated.

Is there any other information anybody would like to offer?

 

[David.rhsc]

Thank you very much for your replies; your advice in much appreciated.

Is there any other information anybody would like to offer?

Double check your RAM spec. From what is posted it looks like the RAM is faster than the board. Not a huge deal 95% of the time. Corsair is pretty good, so should just clock itself to the board. If you are getting into clock timings (like on the CPU and overclocking bus/ram) then your knowledge exceeds mine.

I'd get a different series of WD drive. Most of their drives are good, but the RE3 series is going to give you the best longevity. You don't need a Raptor (as cool as they are) or anything, but the RE3 series drives are downright bulletproof - assuming that they are just the next iteration of the RE2.