Best Editing PC?

J

Jen

New member
For those of you who aren't Mac users...What other PC systems are you using to edit on? I'm thinking of building a AMD OPTERON system because I can upgrade to the 64fx when the price drops. Has anybody used an OPTERON system for editing yet?

What are some other good systems? And what is your personal favorite graphics card for (editing not gaming :D) below $700?
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

I would love to have a decked-out Alienware PC (Intel), but I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon... I would probably build my own though when I get my next editing system together.

The Alienware's come with the Matrox RT100.x or whatever they are called video cards in their video editing PCs.

I heard those are pretty good.
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

[quote author=Jen link=board=Links;num=1080239661;start=0#0 date=03/25/04 at 10:34:21]For those of you who aren't Mac users...What other PC systems are you using to edit on? I'm thinking of building a AMD OPTERON system because I can upgrade to the 64fx when the price drops. Has anybody used an OPTERON system for editing yet?

What are some other good systems? And what is your personal favorite graphics card for (editing not gaming  :D)  below $700?[/quote]

I asked Steve Rogers the same questions just a few days ago. Since then he has left DVXUser.com unfortunately, but here is his reply to me:

If I were buying a machine today, the choices are simple.

For Dual Opteron, A Tyan K8W dual motherboard is an absolute rock solid item. it's expensive at 485.00, but it has a ton of extras.

People might recommend the MSI Dual board which is almost half the price, but they fail to understand the specifics of the engineering flaw in the MSI board.

If you were going to wait, say till May, I might consider the nVidia nForce3 250gb. That is the chipset, not the manufacturer. of a board.

The nForce would be my first preference.

Ram: Corsair. Without a doubt the best on the market. For Otperon you need Registered memory.

Video card: GeForce Quadro. There are a number of brands on the Quadro, any is good. I prefer them to ATI as I have had numerous problems with ATI cards and the abysmal support for OpenGL.

SATA drives: Main drive, Western Digital 36gb SATA 10,000rpm. One fast drive.

Also, Western Digital has just released 10,000rpm 74gb drives. I have 4 of them coming.

DVD/R/RW/+_ etc. Pioneer DVR A07 Multipurpose drive. Doesn't get much better.

However Sony has a new drive, coming very soon (April) DRU 700, that is an 8.5gb capacity DVD burner. But it's going to be like 400.00

with all the components built in these days it's almost impossible to build a bad system. Buy a MB, ram and video card and you are done.
Click to expand...

-Rodger
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

Every one has it's own opinion , here is my :)

I have dual Opteron system with 844 CPU's on MSI moatherboard, don't know what flaws he speaking about, but it pass test well. Tyan moatherboard have lots of problems, it's not my guess,or i read some where on web site, it's based on over 1000 nodes live test, at my work. They still have a lot problem with BIOS and ECC memory. Cap's still blow up on them also.
Memory - use that sugest by motherboard manufacturer, for full tech support. most of them recomended Samsung.
Hard drive Serial ATA is best, but if you set two 10K RPM in striping mode (RAID 0), it will be screaming.
Video card : have money, go with Quadro FX, or Geforce FX 5900 (XT about $177)

Low on budget, or not sure, go with dual Intel Xeon, or with dual AMD Athlon MP.
I run benchmark on my home systems: almost no different between my dual AMD 2800+ MP and dual Opteron 844, both had 2 Gbt RAM ECC. Windows XP PRO. It should be different when Windows XP 64 will support AMD processors. Opteron's on Tyan moatherboard preformed slower then on MSI motherboard.
Again this is subjective openion and based on my own experince, some web site may sugest different thing based on there sponsors, or what they read some where.
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

A quick question..ok...it's an embarrassing one but what exactly is RAID? How does it work...I've got the feature on my ASUS MB but I don't know what the heck it is ...all I know is it has something to do with speed? :-[
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

basically, its a feture for using a hard drive disk array at high data transfer rates.- for a more detailed explanation which i dont care to write a book about here and now, it should be in the manual for the motherboard.

i too have an asus mother board, and i use the ata controller along with the the promise raid feature for the 250 gig drives, cause winxp dosent like running them off the ide controllers.  
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

A RAID is where you string more than one hard disk drive together and use them as one drive.  There are different types.  One type records part of the information on each of multiple drives, and is used for its speed of transfer and large capacity.  Another type records identical information on multiple drives and is used for reliability of backup.

Video people use what called a RAID 0, or the type which records different parts of the information on multiple drives.  It makes for very fast transfer of data and a large capacity of storage.
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

RAID is an acronym for "redundant array of independent (or inexpensive) disks". It's a way to use multiple hard disks to greatly speed up file operations, or to provide inherent backup safety, or both. You chain multiple drives together, and the operating system sees them all as one big, super-fast hard disk. It's very fast because in effect you write parts of the file to each drive. Windows NT offers software RAID through "striping".
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

[quote author=Barry_Green link=board=Links;num=1080239661;start=0#7 date=03/26/04 at 12:56:22]RAID is an acronym for "redundant array of independent (or inexpensive) disks".  It's a way to use multiple hard disks to greatly speed up file operations, or to provide inherent backup safety, or both.  You chain multiple drives together, and the operating system sees them all as one big, super-fast hard disk.  It's very fast because in effect you write parts of the file to each drive.  Windows NT offers software RAID through "striping".[/quote]

Thanks guys! So if I turn on my RAID Promise and run RAID 0 on my hardrives do I lose my partitions?
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

Yes. Be sure you save data before convert hard drives to RAID 0.
You need minimum 2 HD for RAID 0.
3 HD for RAID 5 .. etc.
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

Jen, as far as I know, they also have to be identical capacity drives (both 200GB, or both 250GB) with identical spindle speed (7200RPM, etc.)
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

[quote author=Rush link=board=Links;num=1080239661;start=0#10 date=04/01/04 at 09:17:50]Jen, as far as I know, they also have to be identical capacity drives (both 200GB, or both 250GB) with identical spindle speed (7200RPM, etc.)[/quote]
You can mix capacity and speed, but with penalty. Here more info about RAID types 0 - 3 .

Raid 0
Description The simplest RAID level with the best performance.
It is not RAID in a sense however, because it involves no redundancy. Files are broken down into user-defined stripes and sent to each disk in the array.
Support This level is supported by all hardware controllers, SCSI and ATA.
It is also supported by most software RAID solutions.
Requirements You will require a minimum of two hard disks to create the array.
Capacity Smallest Drive * Number of Drives
Rebuilding None, failure of any drive results in complete loss of all data.
Performance
Performance is theoretically doubled, though because of overhead that isn't the case. Estimate a 90% increase in both reading and writing (random/sequential).
Notes This is a very risky level. Be certain to create regular backups to prevent loss.

Raid 1
Description This level includes 2 types. Mirroring is when all data is copied onto two hard disks. Should one of them fail, the other will operate as a single drive until the failed drive can be replaced. Duplexing requires two hard disks, and two controller cards and can tolerate the failure of one or both.
Support This level is supported by all hardware controllers, SCSI and ATA. It is also supported by most software RAID solutions.
Requirements You will require a minimum of two hard disks to create the array. If you are creating a duplex level 1 array, you will also require an additional controller card.
Capacity Identical to that of the smallest hard disk.
Rebuilding Relatively fast with low downtime.
Performance There will be a slight degredation of read performance, but write performance will improve.
Notes This level is often used by people requiring a high fault tolerance at a low cost. Duplicated data is often more reliable than parity.

Raid 2
Description Level 2 is the only level which does not use mirroring, striping or parity. It instead uses something similar to striping with parity by splitting data bit by bit and spreading it over redundancy and data disks. The redundancy bits are calculated in a similar way as ECC memory, which are then copied to dedicated ECC disks. When it is read back, those ECC codes are read as well to confirm that no errors have occured. If a single bit error is found, it can be automatically corrected.
Support Specialized controllers are required.
Requirements Specifications are dependant on the controller being used, but a typical setup requires 10 data disks and 4 ECC disks (14 total).
Capacity Dependant on implementation, assuming identical drives, then ( Total Drives - ECC Drives ) * Capacity
Rebuilding Only one drive can fail in this array, and it cannot be one of the disks storing data.
Performance Poor performance in all respects (due to ECC calculation overhead) except for sequential reading.
Notes This level is not used in modern systems, and is only included for completeness.

Raid 3
Description Byte-level striping with a dedicated parity drive.
Support Supported by mid-high end RAID cards.
Requirements Minimum of three hard disks of identical size and type.
Capacity Smallest Drive * Number of Drives - 1
Rebuilding Can tolerate the loss of one drive. Rebuilding can take many hours.
Performance All performance is improved with the exception of random writing. This is due to the bottleneck of the dedicated parity drive.
Notes Raid 5 is normally a better choice for transactional environments, with the exception of serving or editing large files.
 
Re: Best Editing PC?

From a performance standpoint, don't need RAID for editing DV streams. Makes sense though if you're using RAID for redundancy.
 
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