New build needed £2700 budget

KhuramShakeel

KhuramShakeel

KhuramShakeel

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Hey guys, firstly forgive me if I'm in the wrong place this is my first ever post!

I'm stuck in buying a new build. I'm interested in the I7 980X but don't really know if that's what I need and if I do, then what would be the best motherboard, ram, hard drives and so on?

To put things into perspective, I want a system that will be used purely for raw HD video editing using Adobe Premiere Pro and After effects as well as other 3D software. I don't necessarily have to have to spend the entire amount if I don't need to, but I'm after a system that can encode and edit raw HD footage without a sweat! My current ancient system takes almost 9hours to encode a 20min edited footage into MPEG 2 Bluray!

Please help I need a complete system, sound card is not that important!

Thanks guys
 
That's quite a large budget!

Sandybridge's QuickSync comes in handy with HD editing, and the inbuilt GPU should be enough for your uses.

Did 16gb RAM but I think that's overkill, 8gb should be enough really.

Also, place the two samsung drives in RAID. Should help with the storage.

You can also change the 2600K to the retail version if you don't mind the stock cooler, but I changed it to OEM and added a CPU cooler to keep the system quiet.

1000hdvidbuild.png
 
The man needs a decent monitor with that, and also, no graphics card?

EDIT: "the inbuilt GPU should be enough for your uses."

my bad.

Monitor though?
 
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http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/142?vs=287

2600K walks over the 980X... well kind of.... But £/performance it's definitely better.

The only thing to bare in mind is if you can delay until Intel have fixed their chipset issue, as I expect you'll probably be plugging in quite a few things to Sata.

Stuck windows 7 in there... didn't know if you needed it but if you do...

Product Name Qty Price Line Total
Gigabyte P67A-UD7 Intel P67 Chipset (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard - (Sandybridge) £279.98
(£233.32) £279.98
(£233.32)
Intel Core i7-2600K 3.40GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £263.99
(£219.99) £263.99
(£219.99)
KFA2 GeForce GTX 560Ti EX OC Edition 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £204.98
(£170.82) £204.98
(£170.82)
Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive (CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1) £185.99
(£154.99) £185.99
(£154.99)
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit - OEM (GLC-00736) £149.99
(£124.99) £149.99
(£124.99)
Corsair Professional Series™ Gold AX750 High Performance 750W Power Supply (CMPSU-750AXUK) £136.84
(£114.03) £136.84
(£114.03)
Corsair XMS3 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX8GX3M2A1600C9) £109.99
(£91.66) £219.98
(£183.32)
LG BH10LS30 10x BluRay-RW / 16 x DVD±RW Drive - Black (Retail) £89.99
(£74.99) £89.99
(£74.99)
Fractal Design Define R3 Midi Tower Case - Black Pearl £79.99
(£66.66) £79.99
(£66.66)
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD103SJ) £41.99
(£34.99) £83.98
(£69.98)
Akasa AK-CCX-4002HP Venom CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775/LGA1155/LGA1156/LGA1366/AM2/AM3) £35.99
(£29.99) £35.99
(£29.99)
Sub Total : £1,443.08
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £13.75
VAT is being charged at 20.00% VAT : £291.37
Total : £1,748.20

Tbh, not great with the high end specs, but thought I'd give it a shot....

I'll talk you through bits I guess i7 2600k > 980X as you can see on link. Even for your uses.

Graphics card isn't the top end, but it's fairly good, and I'm not sure how much you'll rely on it. But then again if you need it at some point it's there, and is reasonable.

Put a 128gb SSD. This should be big enough to hold your main software and OS. If not, there is room in your budget to expand it. If you have these programs on the SSD, they'll just generally work faster.

PSU is fairly expensive for it's W but, it's solid, reliable, and good on efficiency

Got you 16gb of Ram. The Corsair stuff should be fine, you could actually probably cut more of the cost off if you went for the Geil Ram.

BluRay RW - figured this was essential.

Case - wasn't sure what you wanted. Put an R3 in their because it's reasonable nice has a fair number of HDD trays, and is quiet. It's also not very showy, but is quiet sleek, which I guess suits your line of work.

2 1tb harddrives - Figured you'll probably need quite a bit of storage for docs and stuff

CPU cooler - Aftermarket cooler, good value, can't really knock it.

You might want to wait to see what other people suggest, but yeah this is a rough estimate I'd put down.

kd
 
"the inbuilt GPU should be enough for your needs"

most would agree that for video and 3d this is true, However GPU rendering within 3D and video applications is MUCH quicker, like 1000-5000% quicker.

There are only a handful of GPU rendering softwares at the moment, but a new standard called OpenCL is coming up. This will allow the GPU to be utilised within video and 3D environments.

It would be more future proof to spec a p67 with any GPU, basic or high grade. If a basic GPU is selected he could upgrade later.

Be sure to search Octane render and enjoy. Search for Iray (IIRC) too, it allows Vray to be rendered using the GPU, which is much quicker than using the CPU + ram.

BOTTOM LINE - GET A GPU and a P67 MOBO, for future proofing.
 
Ok, couple of general thoughts here:

Definately need proper graphics card, Premier can use CUDA to help speed up encoding and effects in real time, so I'd suggest Nvidia, but make sure its one of the models on Adobe's compatability list. Also 3D was mentioned, and After Effects uses Open GL processing for its 3D effects.

RAM is also very important, the more the better when using After Effects (at least with CS5 it is, as its now 64bit), especially when doing HD. Means you can have a decent amount of RAM preview, helps workflow and speed no end.

Recently specced a machine for a friend whose an after effects designer and we specified 48Gb RAM, pair of 5600 series 6 core Xeons in an EVGA Classified SR2 motherboard. Monster of a machine that came in around the £6k mark. He reckons it will have paid for itself in a year simply because of how much quicker he'll be able to work now.

Worth also considering a RAID5 array for the media drive, if you have a 4 drive array you get increased performance and redundancy. So 4 x 2TB F4s for instance would give you 6TB of storage and a big increase in speed.

E-I
 
Turns out Adobe's certification programme for CUDA cards is far from being on the ball, the list is pretty short but from what I understand a lot of people are using non-certified cards without issue.

Check out this Link

E-I
 
On the gfx front, something like the GTX 580 mentioned above would be great, could easily get away with a 480 or potentially lower. Most important thing is for it to have at least 1024Mb memory and DDR5. The more CUDA cores the more processing availabel and the more effects happening in real time.

E-I
 
My contribution, but really with that budget there's quite a choice.

1500system.jpg


- Sandybridge i7-K processor.
- A P67 board.
- Lots of ram (cheap now).
- A efficient 3rd party cooler.
- Two reliable fast HD, RAID 0 (could be OTT).
- a 120GB (or about) SSD for system and programs.
- A fast NVIDIA card, CUDA enabled.
- A reliable PSU, around 750W.
- A good silent case.
- A Bluray writer (which I forgot).
- An external backup system (which I forgot).
 
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I would be carefall about using cuda for video encoding because the quaility of the final products is worse then what you get from conventional encoding (same applies for Stream). If play back is important consider getting a discrete card like HD 5750.
 
Freddie1980 said:
I would be carefall about using cuda for video encoding because the quaility of the final products is worse then what you get from conventional encoding (same applies for Stream). If play back is important consider getting a discrete card like HD 5750.
Click to expand...

I'd be careful with this, I've no idea how good or not CUDA video encoding is on its own, but can confirm that using the correct settings in Adobe premiere CS5 with CUDA support, the quality is the smae and happens much faster than doing it in software alone. Adobe are calling this thier Mercury Playback Engine, and its not quite the same thing as just using CUDA to encode video, its actually premiere using CUDA to accelerate its encoding, so theoretically it will be exactly the same quality as non CUDA accelerated encoding in Premiere and works much quicker.

Also the advantage of the CUDA processing with premiere is it allows certain effects to be rendered in real time during playback rather than having to pre-render effects before playback, this feature isn't available on ATI cards (or at least not to the same level).

Useful post I found here

E-I
 
for that budget, i'd really recommend you look at dual socket Xeon setup.

I built a complete 8 core xeon (2.5ghz harpertowns) machine with 16GB of ram using a tyan board for 1600 pounds 3 years ago.

You could get something with dual westmere, or wait for sandybridge based xeons.

A tyan board using an intel 5520 will set you back ~300, the two xeons 6cores around ~1500 and then a small SSD for OS, raid1 for data if you dont allready have a NAS.
 
brendan said:
for that budget, i'd really recommend you look at dual socket Xeon setup.

I built a complete 8 core xeon (2.5ghz harpertowns) machine with 16GB of ram using a tyan board for 1600 pounds 3 years ago.

You could get something with dual westmere, or wait for sandybridge based xeons.

A tyan board using an intel 5520 will set you back ~300, the two xeons 6cores around ~1500 and then a small SSD for OS, raid1 for data if you dont allready have a NAS.
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This is something to consider, although I'd suggest waiting till Sandys dual chips come out.
 
Hmm some pretty useful yet confusing information there guys! Ok I was under the impression that the i7 980X was 'very good at encoding'. This is what I managed to find last night, but again, your comments on this are most welcome.

i7 980x - main reason being that although premiere pro can be accelerated via a cuda enabled graphics card, after effects is more CPU intensive, and with the added advantage of having 6 cores, would this not perform better?

Asus P6X58D-E - main reasons being the added sata 6.0gbs option and the usb 3.0

Kingston Hyperx memory 12 GB

WD 600 GB velociraptor as main hard drive, may opt for ssd but for price/capacity not sure

Blu ray writer is a must so I was thinking of this one Pioneer BDR-205BK.

Graphics card I’m inclined towards an Nvidia Quadro 4000, however will this be significantly quicker than the geforce’s for the task in question? Considering that 16min of HD footage is almost 8GB.

I am also interested in over clocking the CPU so i guess i will need a better aftermarket CPU cooler. I’m not too fussed on monitor as i can use my Panasonic screen via hdmi.

I guess the main point is, if this setup performs that much quicker and can handle future applications then this may be a good option. On the other hand, if it will give no real advantage then the i7 2700k may be the way to go, or the two Xeon setup?

Well this has confused me a whole lot more....:)
 
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To put things into perspective, I want a system that will be used purely for raw HD video editing using Adobe Premiere Pro and After effects as well as other 3D software. I don't necessarily have to have to spend the entire amount if I don't need to, but I'm after a system that can encode and edit raw HD footage without a sweat! My current ancient system takes almost 9hours to encode a 20min edited footage into MPEG 2 Bluray!
Click to expand...

Depends the level of performance you want really. a Dual xeon would be a beast, but do you really need so much power?

ATM, these are the first sandybridge generation. Q4 there'll be hexacore and octocore on socket 2011. Prices will be eye-watering though.
 
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