Mini ATX and Shuttle for editing?

Capt Quirk

Capt Quirk

Veteran
My edit machine dies every time I try to render anything, so I'm thinking it's time to put it down- " C'mon Ol' Yeller, let's go out back..."

Anyways, I was looking at the shuttle cases with a mini ATX board. With a dual or quad core Intel, it should scream, but I was told that the Shuttles were only for gaming or home media center, editing would cause too much heat. I'd like to be able to carry this box on location from time to time, which makes the Shuttle cases perfect. They are small, and even have a handle on them!

Any thoughts or comments?
 
You could build a nice Shuttle machine with a q6600 in it, but what is going to limit you is its hard drive bays, most shuttle ones have one hard drive bay, and one 3.5 inch external, so your limited to 2 or 3 hard drives max.
 
I just set up one of these shuttles and it works great. Screams like a mofo. As for the HDD bays, I edit USB or firewire on all external drives anyway, so to me it's basically just a processor.

But so far so good. I built a great little box for about $900. 4 gigs ram, QuadCore, real nice video card.

So far I am very very happy.

And I know another DVXUser who got me into it(Isaac Brody) and neither he no I have run into "heat" issues with editing yet...Isaac sent me his list on newegg, and I went with that, with a few tweaks.
 
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I have seen some of these cases that have 2 internal, 2 external 3.5 bays. They might not have been Shuttle by brand, but similar in size. Being able to run a Raid 5 was at the top of my list.

My plans were, 3 drives for the Raid, 1 for the OS, the Raid Controller card, DVD Burner, and likely find a capture card for it. I want something other than firewire, and HDMI is out of the question. I thought about putting my old DV Storm card in it, but if I remember right, that was an oversized card, so it might not fit.
 
Yeah, but you can do pretty much any RAID configuration in an external HDD case. And I know OS X does OS RAID too. WinXP Pro does as well, but only RAID 0.

And I have an esata card in mine as well, so the external has estata connection.

What's wrong with firewire? And why not keep your existing machine just to capture and then edit on this?
 
Mark Harris said:
Yeah, but you can do pretty much any RAID configuration in an external HDD case. And I know OS X does OS RAID too. WinXP Pro does as well, but only RAID 0.

And I have an esata card in mine as well, so the external has estata connection.

What's wrong with firewire? And why not keep your existing machine just to capture and then edit on this?
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Windows XP is not Tied to any flavor of RAID, it works with Raid 0,1,0+1,5, or 10.
Raid is controlled normally by hardware, windows XP just needs a driver for it.
 
I'm running raid 5 on my XP machine. It is the number of drives that dictates what you can do, not the os. raid 5 needs 3 or more drives.

As far as why I want something other than firewire, I was hoping to be able to use this small machine to stream live web events, and have heard there might be issues with 1394 lagging? So, since I can't afford a 1394 mixer anyways, I was going to capture either with RCA or S-vid.
 
how is your RAID 5 set up? I know all about RAID, and I know WinXP can work with any hardware RAID configuration. But what I'm talking about is WinXP having the ability to create software RAIDS with no additional hardware or software. Is that how you are doing RAID 5? And if so, send me a link or something so I can see how.
 
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I'm using a HighPoint Rocket Raid. I have the controller card and software running. The last raid I used was an 0 +1, that was software and motherboard only. Now, the sales guy I talked to yesterday said there was a motherboard that had Raid 5 on it, but I haven't seen one yet.
 
It comes with it's own power supply. The shuttle I got has a MOBO and everything in it. I will send you my wishlist from newegg. I am not sure how to make it public...I can email it though. Send me your email address.
 
Believe me Mark, I have been scouring the net for barebones mini desktops. Did yours come with the 250 or the 400 watt?
The sales guy I talked to yesterday pretty well shot down everything I wanted though. He said I needed Vista to run multi core CPUs, I needed expensive unbuffered Ram, the Shuttles wouldn't handle the heat from editing, I would need at least a Mid Tower. By the time he was done, a cheap little PC was going to run me $1,000.
 
Capt Quirk said:
The sales guy I talked to yesterday pretty well shot down everything I wanted though. He said I needed Vista to run multi core CPUs, I needed expensive unbuffered Ram, the Shuttles wouldn't handle the heat from editing,
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That´s absolute BS! I build 4 Shuttle editing/capturing PCs we use in field and never had a heat problem - or any other problem at all.

I never use Vista cause it eats ram and performance for eye candy and causes many other problems - XP can handle multi cores pretty well.

Normal ram is fine.

The question is - do you need multicore or rather the fastest single core you can get?

Premiere uses multicores but only a view processes are able to make real speed out of them.

During normal editing a single core is more than enough.

When rendering our quadcores only work arround 25% in the task manager (compared to Cinema 4D rendering where all 4 cores go permanently at 100%)

If you do a lot of encoding (to mpeg 1/2/4, andwhatnot) multicores speed things up but for just editing a fast single is better.

Frank
 
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I built my shuttle about a month ago. Runs Avid, Photoshop, and After Effects great. But pick up a copy of XP 64 bit pro to take advantage of all 4gigs of ram. No problems with heat, no crashes, and nice and compact.
 
Yeah, we found out that too. XP64bit helps a lot on larger Premiere projects.
Probably the best Windows system ever (since the 64bit NT system for Alpha Processors in the 90es)

Frank
 
Whether I need a Multi core or not, that's a good question. Never had one before, my last chip was the Athlon 64, maybe 2400? It did ok, even with only 1 gig of ram, but it just doesn't seem to cut as well as it used to. I blame the Mach Speed board I got with it.

So, being an AMD fan from way back, I was considering the new Intel chipset, just to see if there is a difference. You know, that old argument, AMD vs Intel.
 
Capt Quirk said:
Whether I need a Multi core or not, that's a good question. Never had one before, my last chip was the Athlon 64, maybe 2400? It did ok, even with only 1 gig of ram, but it just doesn't seem to cut as well as it used to. I blame the Mach Speed board I got with it.

So, being an AMD fan from way back, I was considering the new Intel chipset, just to see if there is a difference. You know, that old argument, AMD vs Intel.
Click to expand...
Right now, Intel Stomps AMD... There inst much debate anymore.
 
Intel may be faster, but AMD is affordable. Of course, most of my attraction to AMD, stems from them taking back a bad chip out of warranty, no questions asked. They seemed to change when they took over ATI, cause their service ain't what it used to be.
 
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