Video Editing PC

I assume you'll get premier pro, because without GPU acceleration it's slow.

I'm looking for a video editing PC as well and hate Dell. I will be using Adobe products so the nVidia speed advantage is worth going out of my way to skip ATI.

You should check out newegg.com and see if they have anything in your budget that looks good.

I like this system, but haven't really made up my mind:
http://www.newegg.com …aspx?Item=N82E1​6883229189

It's an AMD processor, but looks fairly good. Here are some benchmarks with price/performance comparison. http://www.cpubenchmar​k.net/high_end_cpus.ht​ml

If you aren't going super high-end with your intel i7, consider AMD. Their motherboards tend to be cheaper as well as cheaper CPUs. Then again, if you throw in a 900 watt power supply and a GTX 480 that sucks down 430 watts when it's working (running at over 90 celcius!) you're looking at really needing the liquid cooling they include in that system I linked above... crazy. So that system in particular isn't cheap, but there are other makes/models to check out there.

Also, the DDR3 ram is 1600Mhz, compared to 1333MHz used in some systems. Booting off a SSD may or may not really help, but it sounds cool.

One down side of that CyberpowerPC sytem is that the AMD motherboard only has 4 RAM slots. So upgrading past 8 gigs later will cost more since you have to toss out a perfectly good stick to put in a bigger one. But hey, it has cool blue LEDs illuminating it and has a cool name.

Anyone else see any place to get AMD systems with nVidia cards?

MCB wrote in post #10967546
Booting off a SSD may or may not really help, but it sounds cool.

a) it does sound really cool
b) I could go from shut off to fully operational Windows in around 20 seconds. that was awesome!!

Also, currently the i7 blows any of the AMDs out of the water, so if you can afford it, go with the i7. That being said, there is no reason an AMD won't work. It just might work slower :P

Skip the Phenom and go i7. From all the benchmarking and reading I've done, seems like the i7 Quad Core fares better than the six core Phenoms.

If you're spending 1800 on the PC you should be able to get an i7 chip in there, no question about it.

Absolutly go with the i7. It has the ability for hyper threading which will give 8 threads available to your OS for MORE POWER!

Dell must really have some bargains going on, because at this level of performance prebuilt systems will almost always be more expensive then putting together your own. I admit I did not click on your link, but consider that with these kinds of prebuilts, you can almost totally forget about upgrading parts here and there. PSU are generally minimal, as well as mobo's are minimal and provide the least amount of slots.

Yes, the Dell is limited to only one PCI x16 slot on the Studio XPS. The power supply is published at 525W on the Studio XPS 9100 (425W on the lesser models), but is upgradeable with any standard ATX (modular or not) 24pin or 20+4pin power supply. However, many gamers have noted the Dell power supply units are underrated by around 80-90%. So even a modest 90% underrating would mean it's roughly a 575W.

If you plan on overclocking or running dual/triple graphics cards, go with a custom build machine, or get an Alienware when that goes on sale (which it does). The deals at Dell come and go, so you just have to shop around.

I swore I would never get another Dell (my laptop is a Lenovo), but I was lucky enough to score my PC setup in order to buy a SteadiCam Merlin with the money saved. And I did A LOT of research on a lot of systems before I clicked "Customize" and "Add to Cart" on the website.

JPM Photography wrote in post #10967579
Also, currently the i7 blows any of the AMDs out of the water, so if you can afford it, go with the i7. That being said, there is no reason an AMD won't work. It just might work slower :P

It's slower, yes, as the benchmarks I linked clearly show. But the top of the line i7 costs $900 for the CPU alone. Many i7 chips are slower than the phenom, like the 860, 870, 920, 930... so... not all i7 chips smoke AMD. The cheaper ones sure don't. (edit: so this includes the choices originally mentioned by the OP)

(edit: I'm referring to the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T present in the system I linked to)

I looked at dell and the only systems with a nVidia card sucked. Why spend $200 or more for an ATI card (on a faster system) that I'm going to rip out and replace with a $500 GTX 480?

Getting that i7 and running a radeon isn't giving you a faster system if you are using Adobe video editing software.
(edit: which is what both I and the OP want to do... run Premiere as fast as possible)

Anyway, to each his own. But there is more to consider than the CPU benchmarks, and there are other places to buy than Dell. Just in case anyone is interested...

drPheta wrote in post #10967718
If you're spending 1800 on the PC you should be able to get an i7 chip in there, no question about it.

With a sucky ATI (for Adobe) video card that will cripple Premiere and After effects. Enjoy you speedy i7.
(edit: except the i7-930 is slower than the Phenom i mentioned before)

Or enjoy spending another $400-500 later to get a supported nVidia card. Is that cheap Dell cheap still?

(edit: but the up-front cost is quite a bit cheaper for the system the OP finally bought, so it's still a great system that will perform well. I just don't want to upgrade for a few years so the bigger power supply, better graphics card, etc are worth the initial investment from my perspective)

One factor no one mentioned is hard drives.
When I first tried video editing it took overnight to do 10 minutes of footage and write to a DVD on a core 2, 3.4 with 4 gigs of RAM. I did some troubleshooting and found the disk queue was going berserk. I added a cheap adaptec RAID card with 3 x 340g drives. It then took 20 minutes to do the same thing.
Ever since then every machine I have built has had a RAID card and I get no issues .. except lack of creativity and skill.

The disk queue... so... how would that work with a system that boots of a small-ish SSD? If the video files (and temp files, cache, whatever) are all on the SSD, that should be pretty good. But if it doesn't all fit you're in trouble.

So what can be off on a second hard drive? If the source video is there but the rendered preview files are on the SSD... You're just reading the source but you're reading/writing those other temp files... if they are on different drives does that help?

How about an external RAID over eSATA?
(http://www.cooldrives.​com …aid-system-sata-raid.html)
I use RAID at work, but not for video files that are being edited so I have no idea about how their performance stacks up. Is an external RAID an option or are they too slow compared to internal configurations?

SSDs are faster but if you have something that's disk intensive, it would still benefit from being in a RAID array. RAID in this instance isn't about redundancy, it's about writing 1/3 ( or less ) of a data to 3 ( or more ) disks at the same time rather than 1 contiguous blob ( technical term ). I have striping with parity for the redundancy as well as speed... the small reduction in performance for the parity writing isn't really noticable and if one disk takes a dive, I still have the data.
To be honest, I have never tried a RAID over eSATA, only on board. With the cost of large disks and RAID cards being small these days, I didn't see any reason to change it. As long as the cache / I/O is done on the eSATA I would suppose it would still be faster than a single drive.
Bear in mind this is all my experience, it fixed my problem so I extended the theory to my current i7, mainly because I could. For all I know, a single disk with a large cache with all the processing power that's around these days might do the job.

davidfig wrote in post #10965339
I assume you'll get premier pro, because without GPU acceleration it's slow.

It's not any slower than any other NLE, but with a proper GPU it's blazing.

xa-coupe wrote in post #10973593
SSDs are faster but if you have something that's disk intensive, it would still benefit from being in a RAID array. RAID in this instance isn't about redundancy, it's about writing 1/3 ( or less ) of a data to 3 ( or more ) disks at the same time rather than 1 contiguous blob ( technical term ). I have striping with parity for the redundancy as well as speed... the small reduction in performance for the parity writing isn't really noticable and if one disk takes a dive, I still have the data.

Here is an extreme example of raid awesomeness: http://www.youtube.com​/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

heh, that's taking to the extreme limit but it does demonstrate what RAID can do. I think 24 drive may just be overkill but it gets the point across. With redundancy, you can rip one drive out with no downtime or data loss. It is certainly worthwhile if you want to get into anything that reads or writes a lot as part of your workflow.

drPheta wrote in post #10963204
As I said earlier, I'd build my own but the cost was already several hundred more than the Dell I had pieced together. And, to avoid DOA boards/chips and returns/downtime having CyberPowerPC or iBuyPower build it adds even more.

That's why you go with the best... Pick up a nice DFI motherboard, they are really nice (never had a problem with them) for video cards either Gigabyte or EVGA, but sure do change the fan on them to Zalman. You won't have problems with those either. Then pick up some Geil or Corsair or Crucial are top brands. I have Geil ram, top of the line from 4 years ago and no problems with it. And yes my pc is overclocked extreme and same with video card, no problems so far. Those products been tested inside out, that's why they are a lot more expensive then other cheap brands but you get what you pay for...