What're good HW specs for PC?

L

LUCAS_HITCHBERG

Active member
Hi,

I've pretty much given up on the laptop idea
(see http://www.dvxuser.com/V3/showthread.php?t=26202) and think a more modern 'workstation' is a better investment.

I'd like to get into Vegas more and maybe PremPro as well. Forgoing hardware acceleration and trying to keep the price modest to low. I have a couple of Seagate ATA100 160GB drives and at least one 19" monotor, an older AGP 2 or 4x Video card to start with. I might build a system or buy a preconfigured box. But I'd like to get an idea of what is necessary in terms of CPU GHz, RAM, and motherboard with chipset and form factor advice.

Plan a system drive and 2 AV drives. What's a good idea? SATA, ATA/100, a mix?

How much RAM is 'adequate' for a fairly responsive system?

AMD or Intel? Single or dual? 64bit worth it yet?

And any other suggestions?


I'd like to stay around $1000. I realize $2500 is more likely. $4000 would be hard to swallow. I'd appreciate any help and reccommendations.

Thanks,

LHB
 
Are you planning on only doing NLE work on it? Obviously, the faster the computer, the better, but Vegas can run quite smoothly and responsively on fairly modest systems.

A few points:

1. The more the RAM the better. You'll be able to allocate more RAM to Vegas' Dynamic RAM preview, and thus speed up your edit decisions.
2. Faster CPU/More RAM definitely speeds up rendering. There's no question about it. However, some people adopt a workflow where when it comes time to render, you hit render and go watch a movie. Let the computer do the work while you do something else. A slower computer can do the same rendering as a faster computer, it'll just take longer! :)
3. Faster/Top-end video cards won't do you much good in most NLEs. The reason being is that most NLE software doesn't use the GPU or the video card's RAM to take care of some of the work. Hopefully, more and more software developers will start to take advantage of these fast, yet decently priced cards in the future. Currently, more and more motion graphic programs (i.e. After Effects) are taking advantage of video cards to speed up workflow.

As for "how much?", here's my $0.02

-RAM: 1GB minimum. I just added another 512 stick so I've now got 1.5GB. There is a noticeable difference in speed/responsiveness so I think 1.5GB will become my new minimum :)

-CPU: if you're going to build/buy an "uber-workstation" I'd definitely wait for the dual core processors. AMD's latest and greatest pretty much trounced Intel's chips in video encoding benchmarks. They're going to start out expensive (up to $1k for the fastest AMD or Intel), but this'll also drive down prices of current chips out there. Dual-core chips are just now coming into the market, so in a few months, we should be able to see clearly just how much better they are.

-HD: Definitely a good idea to have a separate system drive and media drive. Definitely not a good idea to simply partition one physical disk to look like 2 system drives in the OS :)
For DV25, I personally use multiple external (Firewire or USB2) drives for my projects. Since I work on multiple projects at the same time, it saves on having to delete files from one project just so I have enough disk space to work on another project-- I just plug-in another disk! SATA most likely does have better performance than ATA (at least on paper), but my ATA disks in their external enclosures are still going strong and suffer no lag when editing. If you plan to get into HD at some point (and who isn't?), a RAID disk array looks like the best option. But you can always upgrade to that when the time comes.
 
Hey Jive,

Planning on mostly NLE, photoshop stuff and try my hand at trueSpace. I've been down this road in 1999-2000, so I am familiar with most of the details. Well, I was at the time. Even so I kinda got burned with the DTV 'broadcast system' from Matrox which they since obsoleted. It's an 850MHz dual processor with 512Mb of memory and a BIOS that doesn't support EIDE drives over 80 gigs. SCSI 160 with 150GB Medea RAID works great, but 150 Gs are nothing anymore. (Dont ask what I paid for it back in 2000.) The DTV cardset won't run under anything beyond Premiere 6.5. Time for a new path...

Anyway, I'm trying to get a notion of how fast cpu, amount of ram, etc to get a feel for prices. I'll be doing DV25 for some time yet, so I don't really need a bleeding edge setup. Things seem to be fairly straight-forward anymore. How fast is your processor?

I do have a copy of After Effects --4.1! Never really got into it, but might upgrade if my proposed PC lets me edit more than I work on it. So a good video card might be something to consider. Thanks for that tip.

I considered external firewire drives. At another forum someone suggested the "HARDBOX" external cases. No tools to open up and a breeze to plug and unplug drives! Google hardbox and you should find references. BTW I think I read recently that SATA drives worked fine for HDV. Don't quote me on that though.


Any other advice? Keep it coming.

Thanks for the input,

LHB
 
I built a system last year with an AMD XP 2500+ and 1GB Ram (which was not so bad back then :)) for about $750. I still edit daily on it and experience no real slowdown except when it comes to rendering. However, in the case of rendering, I'm strongly considering building a few render-only systems as many programs I use can now take advantage of network rendering, allowing me to offload my render jobs to the other computers and let me work on something else on my main workstation.

As for external enclosures, $130 seems a little steep for just the enclosure (tho it does have a firewire800 interface which is still somewhat rare). I purchased a pretty modestly priced (read: cheap) combo (firewire400/usb2) HD enclosure a while back simply as a backup, but turned out to work perfectly fine for editing work, so I bought a few more and swap out drives whenever I need to work on a different project. The best part? It's only $40! Here's the link:
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=306103

BTW, I would recommend getting a combo HD enclosure with at least firewire400 and usb2 interfaces as you never know what computer you're going to have to plug into (saved me a couple times already).
 
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