Editing station for $1500

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USLatin

Panamaniac
Gygabite MoBo good for next 5 years $145
500 SATA 7200.10 (3GB/s) $190
Intel Core Duo E6300 at 5.2GHz total $200 + $65 for fan
Two 1GB DDR2 $175 (leaving two slots for 2GB chips for 6GB later)
500W power supply for $100
Normal keyboard and mouse $50
Fast & big external Hard drive $100
ATI video card (just enough to handle two big LCDs) $150

$1175... have fun picking monitor/s with the rest

I would go for one good one, like a 22' Dell with 1200 horizontal lines and good contrast numbers and use a pawn-shop's CRT for the tools... might be going over the $1500 a tad...

good?


>>EDIT<< I just realized it said E6400, I'm getting the E6300
 
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instead of a 500gb hd you could get 2 320gb . You could use them in raid for speed with raid stripping (It helps if you use raylight(forgot wich nle u use))or for safety with raid mirroring.I ususally get my footage off my editing drive when im done so 320gb is big enough.
Any reason for an ati instead of an nvidia card?I think some software and plug in(magic bullet) make use of the video gpu for rendering....you might look into it.See if it has any benefit in your workflow now or in the future.
Hehe...just some suggestions...
Im dying to get one of those core2.
Cheers
 
Depends on the software you will run and the content you will be editing. I built an unsupported rig for Avid, but it works very well. One of my issues is noise, so I looked at silentpcreview.com to pick my components:

ASUS M2N32 WS Professional
AMD Dual Core CPU - 64 bit future (unlike the Intel)
Antec P180B comp case with a Ninja heatsink (ducted to the case fan, very quiet)
Western Digital SE16 500GB drives (cheap, dependible, quiet, eventually I will have 10 of them)
2GB Ram
Dell 24" monitor
Antec 600W quiet Power Supply

It's a bit more expensive than you suggested, but it is designed to fit my needs for the next few years. Disk capacity and 64 bit processing will be key to future-proofing a computer, and Microsoft is going to really start pushing 64 bit processing with Vista. The software manufacturers will lag of course, but video editing is one of those tasks that really taxes a computer, so it may come sooner than we all think.

Bob
 
I'm looking at an ATI X1650... up to 4 monitors, 512MB... $170
I use Vegas, so it will be plenty for me... don't even need that much

I am not limiting myself with hard drive space, on the contrary, I am setting myself up to later add more 7200.10 500GB drives... I forgot to mention that I am getting an external 500GB not-so-nifty though, but portable...
 
64 bit chips won't work on the gigabyte MoBo, but 64 is 100% not there... ok, maybe 99%...
You are talking about 3 years till NLEs use it and lauch the first versions that incorporate 64bit into their processing... In 5 years you'll start to feel the need to get one, and I'll still be able to cut 1080p with this computer once I overclock and load it with 8GB of RAM, and that's all I'll need for DVD and TV for a few yeard AFTER that. If I'll be able to upgrade my video card, add space, trust me, this MoBo is the deal to jump on right now for those who are money consious like me. If you have money then u r not looking at spending "only" 1500
 
I have just built my new quad core intel running 64bit windows and vegas 6 and 7 run perfectly, I would suggest going with 64bit for a number of reasons.
One being that you can add a huge amount of ram and second being that if you use AE at all and buy the new nvidia 8800 gts or gtx then you get full openGL support for everything which is something that only the big FX4500 etc could do, but only on 64bit, the 32bit driver only supports lights & shadows.

I know you are working on a budget, but I would consider this option if at all possible.

Nick
 
I could add up to 8 GB of DDR2 ram... and for a board that will never have a processor over 8 Ghz total I guess 8GB would do... how much more would it take for me to buy into 64? I'm just guessing that by 2013 processors like the 80 core 1Thz Intel will be out... so the processing power curve just got steeper... ram and storage is moving fast too... so I am thinking I could wait or get something now... I'd be happy with 5.2Ghz, plenty of fast storage, adecuate RAM and finally get out of my laptop... otherwise I'd have to wait longer... I won't buy a new version of Vegas for a while... still running 6... trying to learn how to edit and rendering isn't easy to figure out when everything takes so long...
 
Unless you have an application that takes advantage of a 64-bit version of the OS, I would not go that route because driver support from third parties isn't as good as for 32-bit versions.

And more than 2GB of RAM is equally pointless (and possibly problematic, depending on your motherboard chipset) unless you are running a 64-bit application or you have a 32-bit application that both supports PAE (Phyiscal Address Extensions) and needs more than 2GB of RAM.
 
Because 99.999% of all 32-bit Windows applications cannot take advantage of it because the developers didn't implement PAE. Open up Task Manager and see how much RAM and paged memory your applications actually use -- if they (and the rest of your system) don't come close to using that much memory, there is zero benefit.
 
Sure.

First start Task Manager and leave it minimized in the System Tray or just running in the background. Now go through a typical (for you) Vegas editing/rendering session.

Once you are done (but before you quit Vegas), go back to Task Manager, and click on the Processes tab. Click on the "Image Name" column to sort the list. Find Vegas, and to the right, you should see two columns labelled "Mem Usage" and "Peak Mem Usage" -- this is how much memory is currently being used, and how much was used at the peak.

If you don't see both columns, go to the "View" menu and select the "Select Columns" item, and add the missing column(s) to the process list. There are some other relevant values available, such as "Virtual Memory Size" and "Page Faults" -- the latter indicates how often the system couldn't find required information in RAM and had to refer back to the page file, at which point disk I/O speed becomes crucial.
 
so I'll have to do that on a computer other than my 1GB RAM laptop...
I asked in the Vegas NLE section to see if someone is aware of the max RAM use of Vegas... I just finished editing a few clips of my sister and a friend from when we were in FL for their wedding... can't do it now, gotta rest the eyes...

mybe if I got this $300 LCD it would be easier to keep going: Sceptre 22"
 
I would do it on the laptop as well, just to see how much memory is actually used, and whether it might make sense to upgrade it (provided you actually edit on it).

I did this with Edius 4 Broadcast V4.13 on a multi-cam project containig a mix of DV25 and DVCProHD, and at its peak, it only used about 260MB of the 2GB in my system -- most of the RAM I have goes unused.

Incidentally, the Performance tab in Task Manager will show you a graph of memory and processor utilization. That too can be informative.
 
I would say that more Ram helps most with ram previews in vegas. with the 4gig that I am running I can allow vegas to use the full 1024mb that it wants with out having to close all other apps, ie photoshop which is a ram eating beast.
If you watch your ram usage in the task manager while you render then I think you will see just how much it uses.

Thats just what I found going from a station with 1gig to one that has 4gig, I've found it to be most useful.
 
Oh! Photoshop likes RAM? I see! I just finished a slide-show for my sister's wedding using a ton of old pictures that needed a bunch of stuff, I photoshopped about 90% of the pictures and there must have been about 120 of them! I had Vegas Photoshop and a windows folder to quickly browse and dropp pictures into the programs. I will use Photoshop more and more now... I am learning (slowly) how to create some really pro looking graphics on it.

Someone on the Vegas section said that XP uses 3GB of ram... so maybe I should go for the two 1GB DDR-2 chips and get a cheap pair of 512MB DDR-2s?

I'll be happy regardless (1GB to 3GB) save money, and later when I get a new desktop I won't feel so bad about chucking the 512s for a pair of 2GB chips...
 
I ordered 2 DDR-2 800 chips and a set of two 512MB DDR-2 800s but I heard that mismatching pairs actually slow down your speed because it decreases your banthwith a tad... I heard this before and asked a friend... so I cancelled the $100 512s
 
Mismatched memory modules generally forces the system to run at the lower set of RAM timing parameters. If your system is set up to run in dual-channel mode, it may also experience reliability problems or not even boot.
 
so if I got 800 1Gs and 800 521s it wouldn't be different? (same brand too)

I added a second 7200.10 hard drive, but a 320 cause that was allready out of my budget (don't tell Michelle) so I can get my OS in there and still have space to render to... maybe I should cancell it though and wait till I can get the 500GB to make it all nce and even... then again I have 6 STA ports so what the hell right?
 
"Keeping in mind relatively low influence of the cache memory size on the overall performance, we can state that for less than $200 you can get a CPU running close to a 1000-dollar model." Ilya Gavrichenkov www.xbitlabs.com


There are many people out there getting higher overclocks than I originally read about. When an IT friend mentioned the 1.86ghz duo was down to $200 and it overclocks easily up to 2.6ghz it made me decide to build the workstation now.

I spent all weekend online, placing and cancelling orders. I have cancelled about 6 already! I don't know it if is a bad thing, it surely can't be good for my credit, but I kept on finding better choices and saving money. Actually i didn't save money as I am currently $150 over my maximum budget, lol... but a Dell with similar numbers (I priced one out) would be about $4000+ I searched and read a lot about computers... something I hadn't really done --almost at-- all this whole year and I am delighted with what I have found the state of the bargains to be at...

I found several articles about overclocking the 6300 waaay up. I also found this neat little spreadsheet with the posted speeds of a big number of gaming enthusiasts that frequent www.hardforum.com (not a gay porn forum). I don't know the top claimants are exagerating or not, it sounds likely that they would want to, but the submission procedure seems ok... they ask for a screen shot of the numbers after running intensive process for four ours... then again,who is to say they actually did run it that long? or who is to say that none of these video-game playing uys never heard of Photoshop? ...but I have found corroborating sites for speeds "close" to the top when it comes to the 6300. I saw 3ghz elsewear such as this exellent article that you should read if you are considering OCing the 6300... and for me that's plenty!and aparently this gigabyte MoBo is built to push the limits..!!! :)

If these numbers were true:
E6300s being OC up to 3.73GHz!?! that is a total of 7.5GHz!!! with a $200 CPU!
Unreal...

I'll shoot for 3.5, 7 total... we'll see how close I get. I'll be happy, and probably let it be, once I get to 6.0ghz, wich is the speeds I read about in many different articles and a few forums, and seems to be quite the attainable mark after spending some time (a lot of time) on the tweaking...


maybe I should have named this thread "$6000 computer for $2000"
 
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