Building a computer to run Premier Pro

7 pro will run smoother with editing programs. It mostly has to do with networking, but also has do do with the way it manages resorces and backwards compatibility.

Fx580 is a great card'

Make sure you go with a mobo that is 1366 nit 1165 to insure the cpu you bought will fit.
 
redherring2049 said:
Hey guys. I just preordered Adobe CS5.5 Premier Production, its a preorder and won't be here until sometime in May. My current computers aren't equipped to run an editing software as heavy as Premier, so I'm going to need to build a new one. I looked and compared parts/prices on TigerDirect to the system requirements, and it is around 800 bucks. However, I'm not much of a computer guy, so the parts I picked might not be even what I need, and my question is do you guys have an recommendations for parts and pieces for the computer to run the creative suite?

I'm just shopping around right now and I figure you guys could help me out. The parts I picked are:

Blu-Ray/DVD combo drive
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy SE
StarTech PCI 2 port firewire PCI card
SEA Barracuda 7200 Harddrive, 1TB, SATA-3G, OBM
GeForce GTX SE, 1GB
4g RAM
AMD Phenom II X4 965
Windows 7 Home

Thanks in advance guys!
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Really depends on your workflow. Which camera will you be editing for? RED One with uncompressed 4K R3D files? Or simply AVCHD camcorders? Without knowing that I would say stick to Windows Professional 64-bit or Ultimate 64-bit in order to raise your RAM limit to 192GB (Home only does 16GB).

Due to the Mercury Playback Engine I would go with the best bang for buck graphics card right now, the Geforce 550 Ti 2GB. More RAM is better as I've seen benchmarks where a GTX 260 ties a 460 in speed, so the bottleneck appears to be in video RAM with respect to graphics cards. Keep in mind my second pick would be the Geforce GTX 580 3GB. My third pick of course would be the Geforce Quadro 6000 6GB!

As for the motherboard I would check out any Dual LGA 1366 Xeon based motherboard as having more threads the better.

And finally I would stick to a Solid State Drive for the Operating System at the least. The best of the bunch here is the Vertex 3, these have the highest sustained sequential read/write outputs and the highest I/O's at either queue depth of 3 or 32. With that suggestion in mind you may want to invest in a SATA III RAID card as many of the Dual LGA 1366 based motherboards don't come with built-in support for SATA III. Also a USB3.0 PCI-E card is highly recommended for ingestion as well. And as a bonus you may want to invest in trayless, hot swappable bays for 1.8", 2.5" and 3.5" drives as you can use these for the quickest ingestion times, again depending on your workflow (i.e. the Atomos Ninja takes 2.5" drives).

Again, I'm suggesting these as a general recommendation as I am not aware of your exact workflow.
 
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ectobuilder said:
Really depends on your workflow. Which camera will you be editing for? RED One with uncompressed 4K R3D files? Or simply AVCHD camcorders? Without knowing that I would say stick to Windows Professional 64-bit or Ultimate 64-bit in order to raise your RAM limit to 192GB (Home only does 16GB).

Due to the Mercury Playback Engine I would go with the best bang for buck graphics card right now, the Geforce 550 Ti 2GB. More RAM is better as I've seen benchmarks where a GTX 260 ties a 460 in speed, so the bottleneck appears to be in video RAM with respect to graphics cards. Keep in mind my second pick would be the Geforce GTX 580 3GB. My third pick of course would be the Geforce Quadro 6000 6GB!

As for the motherboard I would check out any Dual LGA 1366 Xeon based motherboard as having more threads the better.

And finally I would stick to a Solid State Drive for the Operating System at the least. The best of the bunch here is the Vertex 3, these have the highest sustained sequential read/write outputs and the highest I/O's at either queue depth of 3 or 32. With that suggestion in mind you may want to invest in a SATA III RAID card as many of the Dual LGA 1366 based motherboards don't come with built-in support for SATA III. Also a USB3.0 PCI-E card is highly recommended for ingestion as well. And as a bonus you may want to invest in trayless, hot swappable bays for 1.8", 2.5" and 3.5" drives as you can use these for the quickest ingestion times, again depending on your workflow (i.e. the Atomos Ninja takes 2.5" drives).

Again, I'm suggesting these as a general recommendation as I am not aware of your exact workflow.
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He bought a i7, Duel LGA 1366 boards are ONLY compatible with Xeons. He needs a single LGA 1366 board. !6Gb of ram is more then enough, i have 12 and its more then enough. I'm assuming he's not editing red based footage or he would have mentioned it. He is also looking for a budget computer, not something with cpus that cost 1000 by them selves. Also why do you need a solid state OS drive. Yea it will make it boot faster but in editing your media drives are what really matter. A raid for media will improve speed, but increasing os drive speed will have little or no effect on editing. almost no one edits off of ssd so a sata 3 raid card is also useless. A sata 2 raid card is fine for enterprise raid drives. Most mobo's have built in raid to.
 
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Anything the fx series, the FX 580 has dual display port plus dvi. Display port can be converted to hdmi/dvi. If you have th emoney the 1800 is a real nice card but probaly out of your price range. i'd recommend the fx580.
 
Note: gfx refers to graphics card.

Using a Gaming gfx in an editing computer is like using a jeep as a commuter car. It will work, but is not gonna be a comfortable fuel efficient ride. Basicaly a gaming gfx has the power but the drivers are designed for gaming and are not optimized for editing. You will need a lot more horse power to accomplish the same results. Gamng gfx shouldn't cause problems but you may find yourself lacking power if you do anything to intense. You will also pull more power from your outlet so you electric bill wont be as pretty. That being said, since my editor is also my gamer, I run dual gtx470's which are gaming cards. It runs fine, but if I used a workstation gfx I could get away with one card for the same performance. If i used a workstation gfx my gaming would absolutely suck though. Its a bigger problem to use a workstation card for gaming then a gaming card for editing, but still getting a card not designed for what your doing will decrease performance.

All that being said, if you do go with a gaming card, go with something from the nvidea gtx series. These gaming cards are a bit more flexible then ati and will edit better then ati's gaming cards. My recommendation is dual gaming gfx or single fx series workstation. Absolutely stay away from ati's gaming cards even if they are a little cheaper.
 
The Nvidia GTX470 is one of the recommended cards for CS5. Make sure, whichever card you get, that it can be used with the Mercury engine. Adobe has a list of approved cards, and a google search will find a list of additional cards that can be made to work.
 
The reviews talks about it running hot. If you can deal with that, having enough fans that is, then you should be good. Good luck.
 
Straight from the horses mouth:

The more cores, cache and the higher the clock speed, the better. Intel processors are preferred over AMD, that lack SSE 4.1+ support, which is heavily used during CPU intensive (read AVCHD, MPEG taks). The basic entry point level for new systems appears to be the i7-930/950 for economical systems and the i7-970/980X for more high-end systems. i7 systems from any series below the 9xx series are not advised, let alone the i3 or i5 series. They suffer too much from the memory controller, the chipset on the motherboard or the lack of Hyper Threading.

The more capabilities to adjust clock speed and memory speed, the better. Overclocking can lead to substantial gains and HP / Dell and the like do not allow that. Be warned. The major brands suffer from lack of overclock ability, fixed (low) memory speed and configurations unsuitable for editing. Better build yourself or turn to a reputable custom builder with demonstrated expertise in video editing. X58 motherboards are currently the best choice.

Definitely use a CUDA/MPE capable video card. It can reduce rendering time by a factor 10 and assists with scaling on export, while improving export quality. SLI is no consideration, since it is not supported. For the time being ATI is out of the game and only nVidia cards with 1 GB+ video memory are worth considering.

Specifically for MPEG encoding, the amount of memory is critical. The more the better. 24 GB is far better than 12 GB. The faster the memory, the better. First is rating (1600 or 1866), then CAS latency. Use at least 12 GB but preferably even more. To use the faster memory, BIOS adjustments are required.

The faster the disk(s), the better. Raids do improve performance. Notice that all Top 20 Performers use Raid configurations and sometimes even multiple Raids. Even SSD's, though widely touted for their speed, benefit significantly from Raid configurations.
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Choose your weapons wisely gentlemen: http://ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.html

Frank
 
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