£1000+ video editor - parts list complete - please review

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Hi guys,

Looking to build a machine that I can use to edit my massive collection of old videos (mostly HD at most, but a few are higher quality). I've spent almost two weeks trying to decide on the parts, and the list below is the best I can come up with given my extremely limited knowledge.

I would like the machine to have no issues playing two 4k vids simultaneously, even better if it can play three. Main use will be movie editing. I have tons of old videos (1080p or less) that I need to trim. Occasionally I may need to dynamically rotate vids (due to phone being held at random angles through the entire vid), or stick a few cropped videos side by side, but thats about it. No effects or colour correction or any of that fancy stuff. I may have to work with higher quality source like 4k or above thanks to all the new phones me and my family use, but just to do the operations/edits mentioned above.

Now my current 8 year old PC can almost manage the tasks I'm talking about. So why the hell do I want such an over the top spec? Simple - I need to do these things quickly, mainly the final render. So a hefty example in my case would be something like - three 1080p vids from my phone. I want to create one video with all three playing side by side with each of the vids cropped or rotated throughout the timeline. The editing process in Premiere Pro on my current machine will take me around 25-30 minutes (lets say each vid is about 10 minutes, with almost 7 minutes trimmed away) if my final video is going to be about 5 minutes long. Rendering the finished video will take more than an hour on my current machine. If I was working with two instead of three vids, the render will take about an hour. For trimming a single 4k video, it will take around half an hour.

There isn't too much I can do about the time I spend editing. Yes a faster machine will help me see the results of my edits quicker so maybe I can cut a few minutes off my editing sessions, but the rendering of the final video is what kills it for me and is pretty much why I haven't bothered anymore. If I can get a new rig which will render a 1080p 5 minute video in a minute or so instead of half an hour, then I will be getting back to work on all the old footage.

I'm thinking of using Da Vince Resolve as its free - but does that mean forking out more on a graphics card? Would I be better off buying software like PowerDirector and getting a cheaper GPU? Perhaps its more related to the actual work I want to do so what do you think based on the scenarios I explained above?

Here's a list of parts that I've come up with. Started off with youtube and amazon recommendations and refined based on some of the things I've read on this site after searching for threads related to video editing and/or Ryzen builds. PLEASE ADVISE on these and what I should change. Once it looks like people approve of the build, I'll go ahead and buy the parts. The prices listed are all from amazon, but once I've finalised the parts list, I'll be shopping around for the best prices.

  • CPU - Still not sure. 2700X vs 3700X vs 3900X?
    Motherboard - The most confusing part for me to find out about. Here's a few I've looked at but by no means do I have a preference. I just hope it can take full advantage of the CPU/RAM/GPU. Two M2 drive slots would be nice, but not necessary. USB-C would also be nice as it sounds like many peripherals tend to use it yet most of the motherboards I checked don't seem to have it?
    • MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX ~ £85
      MSI B450 GAMING PRO CARBON AC ~ £120
      MSI B450-A Pro Max ~ £60
      Aorus X570 AORUS Elite ~ £191
      ASUS TUF X570-Plus - £180
      Gigabyte B450M DS3H - £60
    SSD - Sabrent 1TB M2. Maybe this is overkill, but I think this new M2 tech is really cool so I want! If you end up recommending a motherboard with two M2 slots, I might get two drives.
    RAM - Corsair CMK16GX4M2B3200C16 Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4 3200 MHz C16 XMP 2.0 ~ £70. Haven't gone 32 GB since I'm not editing large 4k videos (yet). Is 3200 MHz good enough or is it worth getting something faster?
    Graphics - as mentioned earlier, I'm really not sure what to do here. Buy some editing software and use a cheap GPU, or use Da Vinci Resolve and use a more expensive card? Then there's the issue of me possibly not having monitors that do more than 1080p (not forever as I will get new monitors, just not now). I'm currently running an Asus VE278H which is 1080p and an old Toshiba TV which does HD, but a friend MAY end up giving me two 4k displays. In case he doesn't, it may be awhile before I buy any 4k monitors. After searching this site and reading a couple of threads, it appears that sticking with my 1080 monitors can affect the parts I decide to go with? In addition to movie editing, I want to be able to play two or three 4k videos simultaneously on my non 4k displays, as well as on better displays in the future. Again, no gaming, just high quality movies or videos that I create. The few graphics cards I was recommended from youtube are listed below but I can't tell whats good or bad and how suited for my needs they will be.
    • ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER EVO OC edition 8GB GDDR6 ~ £410
      MSI RADEON RX 580 ARMOR 8G OC Graphics Card '8GB GDDR5, 1366Hz ~ £170
      XFX Radeon RX 570 RS XXX Edition 1286MHz, 8gb GDDR5 ~ £127
      ASUS GPU Nvidia GTX1650 Dual OC 4G Fan ~ £156
    Case - from youtube - NZXT H510 ~ £75. I am really not bothered about looks. Just want a case that'll do the job. If there's a dirt cheap case out there that will house all my parts and allow enough air flow etc etc - I'm happy.
    PSU - Anything that is Gold standard and gives out 650 Watts or more is good right?

For the OS, I'm going to try and install Win10 pro myself. From what I've read, I need to create a usb boot disk, buy the key off ebay or something and then hopefully the rest will be smooth sailing right?

So based on the needs I mentioned, will a ryzen 7 3700X render my videos much faster than a 2700X? If yes, I don't mind forking out the extra £150 or so. Heck, if it renders faster, I don't mind getting a 3900X.

Many thanks in advance
-Naz
 
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Not sure if it helps but i'm getting the Aorus elite with a 3700x. The tomahawk max is a good budget option but once the b550 is released then you probably would have wished to hold off a little longer and get one of those. The Aorus elite fan position is slightly further away from the GPU which I like also.

I was held back by thinking the fan on the x570 chipset would be an issue but then realized that my Z87 Gryphon has a small 50mm fan on the thermal armour heatsink which has been 100% reliable for the past 5+ years. The chipset fan also looks the same as any laptop exhaust fan so should be reliable as long as there is no dust build up.

The 3700x seems to be the best balance of performance for the next 3+ also. If you are re-encoding video then the extra cores and hyperthreading will speed things up.

Case wise I went for a Meshify C with hard side panel and replaced the fans with Noctua, these fans have been solid for the past 5 years in my Corsair case.
 
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Thanks for the response!

Ok, so possibly hold off until the b550... you've also mentioned the 3700x - not 3900x or possibly the 3950x which should drop in a few days? I don't mind paying for those if I do get a noticeable speed up in render times.

Also wondering if the GTX1650 is the GPU I should get as the LTT video on youtube mentions that the higher end card they tested never had a high load so they went with this card instead. Thoughts?
 
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Based on feedback I got on another thread, here's what I'm looking at now:

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £1,287.04 (includes shipping: £13.20)

The two M2 drives I'll have to get elsewhere since they're so much more expensive at OcUK...

Black Friday doesn't seem to be doing much for the prices of these parts. Any reason to wait? Might as well order right now if not.
 
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Aorus Elite and 3900x
Interesting. I was trying to decide between the 2700x and 3700x, and decided that even though £120 extra for maybe a 10% improvement in encoding/render times isn't as cost effective as I would like, I want something a bit more recent/powerful so went with the 3700x. But another £220 on top of that for the 3900x resulting in maybe another 10% improvement? If the improvement is much more, then I might consider it but how will I find out before buying...

Would you mind explaining why the Aorus Elite over the ASUS TUF? I'm not into overclocking, so not sure what other benefits I would get.
 
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Thing is, I really want (no particular reason) two M2 drives, and since a cheaper motherboard would disable all other PCI slots, I went with the TUF. What do you think?
I also went with 3600 RAM since its only £20 more and apparently its better suited for the 3700x?
That graphics card - I have no idea. Will it contribute to faster encoding times in Resolve or any other editing suite? Just that its £150 more than what I was recommended, which was in turn £70 more than what I got from youtube recommendations. Would really appreciate an explanation so I can decide whether I should use this GPU instead.
That PSU and case is much cheaper than what I listed - I'll probably go with those. Any reason not to?

Many thanks for the response!
 
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I found this helpful:

pic_disp.php
 
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Doubt I'm going to go Adobe. I think its too expensive. Resolve not being free for H.265 - not exactly sure what implications that has for me. Whats so good about it? Mind you my current export settings in Premiere use H265 though I can't remember why I chose it. Size perhaps? Just did a quick search on the topic and someone appears to have resolved the issue of not being to import H265 by installing some paid for extension. Anyway, this is sounding like hassle so maybe I'll ditch Da Vinci. I've included a more concrete example of the kind of simple work I plan to do, so maybe a free editor really will give me all I need?

I fired up Premiere after probably a year and edited an old video from my S3 phone. Here's an example of what i would refer to as a 'lot of work' for one video. 1080p 30fps, trimmed off footage from beginning and end and some bits in the middle. I was filming a game on a CRT screen from an angle, so I had to zoom/crop the video so that the game footage took up as much of the screen as possible, and had to adjust the rotation quite often to keep the game looking 'straight'. In some places I would split the screen 50/50 ish and play portions from a more recent video taken on a OnePlus 7 (a video of a player's hands using an arcade stick). This was also 1080, but just looked so much better. End result was about a 12 minute video, about 7 minutes of it consisted of that side by side stuff and it took 1 hour 14 minutes to render. I have no SSD, i5 650 3.2ghz, 6gb ram and a geforce 315 512mb ddr3 gpu. That sounds quite bad lol, but dayum - for something that I bought in an emergency off the shelf from a superstore around 9 years ago, its keeping up bloody well. I could probably speed this thing up a fair bit with an SSD, but if I can't bring that above example down to less than 10 minutes, I'm not going to bother. Less than 5 minutes and I'll pay for any build!

Assuming I'm ok using Resolve without H265 (yet to be confirmed I guess), you're saying I should dish out the extra £150. If I don't use Resolve, and go for a tool like, say, Powerlink for £100, is the GTX 1660 Super good enough or maybe too powerful?
 
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It may not be suitable, but if you're filming what's happening on a screen, Camtasia is pretty good for that. I use Camtasia for some YouTube Lightroom how-tos. Easy to use, but not very powerful software. Easily runs on my 9 year old i7, great for recording what's happening on the screen.

H.265 is a codec used my the recording device. It's basically higher quality. I tried out Resolve & found it hard to use, then I tried to import an H.265 video & it wanted to upgrade to the Studio version for £200. I ended up buying Premier Pro because I already use Lightroom intensively & occasionally Photoshop. I found it was easier to use Premier Pro & anything I couldn't do, a quick Google search brought up about a million pages on how to do it.
 
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I've drawn up a similar build but with the 3900x, one M2 drive instead of two and the cheap case recommended above.
£1185.

I think the only unknown factor left is the GPU. That'll probably be the deciding factor in which build I go for...
 
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Budget Video Editing rig on LTT: ;)
Probably the first video I watched. The GPU I initially listed was from here, but everyone seems to think its too low end. He also chose a Ryzen 5 instead of the 2700x which I didn't understand, since everyone says that more cores = faster renders.
Besides, the inner fanboy is getting stronger so I'm no longer on a budget :rolleyes: but I definitely want to get as much bang for my buck as possible. Hence the indecision between 3700x and 3900x.
 
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