Planning on Building new Machine: Your favorite components for CS5

J

johnnyevil

Active member
In the near future I am planning on building a new desktop. And while I prefer laptops running OSX, I don't feel like paying the apple tax for a desktop. I'll be installing Win 7 and Adobe Production Premium.

With a budget of $2k, what would you build?

(I already have an NEC 2690WUXi that I use for photo editing)
 
Any computer with an i7 and 16 GB of RAM will kick ass. Having said that the GT 240 with DDR5 RAM offers the best bang for the buck although it would not hurt to get a GTX 470. You can build an ass kicking system for under $1,000.00. Spending more money will just be over kill for PP CS5 however it might give 3DS Max, Maya and After Effects a big boost should you use those programs. Keep in mind the new Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs have just started to ship. I imagine the motherboards will drop in price in a few months. As of now a Sandy Bridge CPU with 16 GB of RAM should kick some major ass. You can get good Sandy Bridge motherboards (LGA 1155) for $150.00 and the CPU (LGA 1155) for about $300.00. I hope this helps.
 
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That actually does help tremendously. The last time I built a computer was 4 years ago, then I've been running Macbooks the last couple of years. My overall concensus is I prefer apple for everything except production. Go figure, right?
 
Take a look at the newly released Intel I5 2500K cpu for the Sandra chipset. It's like 220$, and rivals/surpasses the performance of the high end i7s in many cases.
 
Oh, okay. I was wondering.

I spec'd this out on Newegg:

Core i7-2600K 3.4/3.8
ASUS P8P67 ATX Mobo
EVGA GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) Superclocked 1280MB GDDR5 PCIe 2.0 x16
OCZ Vertex 2 80 SATA II SSD
Icy Dock 2.5" to 3.5" SSD and Hard Drive converter
G. Skill 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1333
WD Caviar Black 1TB 7200rpm x2
LG Black 10X Blu-Ray Burner
Windows 7 Home Premium
Antec Twelve Hundred Black Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case
Antec 850W Continuous Power Supply

Pricing from Newegg is about $1700.

I will also purchase Adobe Production Premium, and possibly Adobe Audition.
 
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Personally, I'm going to let the dust settle on Sandy and wait until they unveil the 6- and 8- core models later on this year.
 
Phil1076 said:
Personally, I'm going to let the dust settle on Sandy and wait until they unveil the 6- and 8- core models later on this year.
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I think that might be wise just to see what the pricing difference is although I imagine the 6 core CPUs will start at about $750.00 and the 8 cores at about $950.00. My i7 at 2.8 GHZ kicks ass so a Sandy Bridge i7 at 3.4 GHZ would be much more CPU horse power than I would need. The 6 and 8 core Sandy Bridge CPUs would be over kill for most of us but if the price was not that bad it might be a wise investement. The LGA 1155 CPUs can accept 32 GB of RAM. I imagine the LGA 2011 CPUs will accept 128 GB of RAM but that is just a guess. For most of us a Sandy Bridge i7 and 16 GB or RAM will work just fine. I need a new audio board more than 8 cores.
 
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The first release of SB will be crippled on the mobo as well. Limited PCI-E lanes, dual channel memory only, etc.

I'd wait also. If I had to buy now, I'd go with an i7 950 and X58 mobo.
 
medeamajic said:
I think that might be wise just to see what the pricing difference is although I imagine the 6 core CPUs will start at about $750.00 and the 8 cores at about $950.00. My i7 at 2.8 GHZ kicks ass so a Sandy Bridge i7 at 3.4 GHZ would be much more CPU horse power than I would need. The 6 and 8 core Sandy Bridge CPUs would be over kill for most of us but if the price was not that bad it might be a wise investement. The LGA 1155 CPUs can accept 32 GB of RAM. I imagine the LGA 2011 CPUs will accept 128 GB of RAM but that is just a guess. For most of us a Sandy Bridge i7 and 16 GB or RAM will work just fine. I need a new audio board more than 8 cores.
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Hypothecically :)
Would these new 8 cores SB i7 processor be good enough to sustaine real time 3k R3d , RED, files or PMW F3 S-LOG 4:4:4 for stereographic 3d production ?
 
The beauty of CS5 is that you reduce the playback resolution for smooth playback. I do fine with an i7 920 and RED 4K at 1/2 res. I have to believe the new 8 cores would be more than sufficient to work with that RED footage, even if you had to dumb it down to 1/4 or 1/8 res while editing.
 
Everts said:
Hypothecically :)
Would these new 8 cores SB i7 processor be good enough to sustaine real time 3k R3d , RED, files or PMW F3 S-LOG 4:4:4 for stereographic 3d production ?
Click to expand...


I would like to think the 8 core Sandy Bridge CPUs could playback R3D clips at 3k resolution using only the CPU. They might even be able to playback 4k using only the CPU but who knows for sure? The Sandy Bridge CPUs pack a mean punch from what I have read so far.
 
medeamajic said:
The Sandy Bridge CPUs pack a mean punch from what I have read so far.
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They definitely do. I just built one, $319 for the i7-2600k cpu and $160 for the Asus mobo, $360 for 8gb of ram, so $839 total. It's far faster than my i7-920 at video work, and it also overclocks easily. I simply selected "performance" in the firmware and that's it, now it runs for hours at 4.4ghz with the stock cpu cooler with no problems. I mostly use Vegas but I've started dabbling in Premiere as well, and I notice that for example scrubbing was a bit choppy on my i7-920, but it's realtime on the i7-2600k. Very happy with this machine so far.
 
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