Best choice of Board for Video Editing

Fozzie Bear · 9 Feb 2008 at 20:42

Hi all,
I am a newbie to these forums but have been reading with interest the threads for some time. The reason for this post is for some advice on a choice of Mobo and CPU for a video editing machine. I dont play games but currently use Prowshow Gold and Womble DVD wizard and Pinnacle Studio Plus and from what I can see all of these would benefit from a multi cored processor to speed up the rendering process.
I currently have a GigaByte SIN1394XP Motherboard with a 3.06Ghz Hyperthreading P4 but basically have had nothing but trouble with it since new. It runs ok with a 1Gb pair of 512Mb Corsair TwinX DDR 400 ram without hyperthreading but wont boot with two more sticks of 1Gb Corsair TwinX which I bought to give Vista some memory headroom :mad:

Anyway I was thinking of a P35 board and a Q6600 Quad chip due to all the good reviews of this processor being very stable. I am not really too worried about overclocking but assume from the experiences that a lot of people have that I could probably run at 3.0Ghz without too much problem on a stock cooler??
I have a lot of large IDE drives in my current set up on the boards raid controller (5 including the boot drive) and two DVD burners to be able to copy from DVD-RW to DVD-R . Trouble is most modern boards are SATA now and only have one IDE channel support. Also I have two capture cards, A Hauppage PVR350 and another which I cant remember the name of, but bother are PCI cards. I have looked at the
I therefore need

a board that supports the Q6600 (preferably with support for the new 45nM CPUs
a board that preferably has two IDE channels
on board Firewire
minimum 2 but preferably 3 PCI slots
onboard sound 5.1 ok
Gigabit NIC and (preferably dual Gigabit as I have two LANs)

I suppose I could try and find an Ultra ATA 133 Raid on a PCIe card if there is only one IDE channel.
I have had a look at the Abit and the ASUS P35 boards and also the OCUK value (J&W??) boards but can't find out any more information on these over and above whats on OCUK website.
I would prefer to keep clear of Gigabyte boards because of the RAM problems I have had and also want to stick with an Intel chipset board.
Any suggestions would be welcomed.
regards
Fozzie

Chimerical · 9 Feb 2008 at 21:07

Well if you had the money, then a dual-socket 771 5400 Seaburg chipset Supermicro Xeon board is the best, coupled with two quad core 5400-series Xeon CPUs.

Otherwise a P35 chipset is best. What you really want for video editing is stability and not too many features. Loads of features just cause more heat to be generated from the chipset. The ASUS P5K-E is worth a look. IDE's would be pretty slow for editing btw, especially if they have 5,400rpm spin times. It's nigh-on impossible to find a decent P35 board with 2x IDE sockets, although congrats to anyone that finds one.

weescott · 9 Feb 2008 at 22:32

A Q9450 will be better than the Q6600 for video editing because of SSE4.

WJA96 · 9 Feb 2008 at 23:29

Fozzie Bear said:
the OCUK value (J&W??) boards but can't find out any more information on these over and above whats on OCUK website.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17823631

Please note the rider on the first post - 99.99% of all the issues with this board have been fixed in the latest BIOS release, and they're working on the ones that are left. J&W are serious about breaking the UK market and they are putting plenty of support into making their products 'suitable' for the expectations of the UK market. kenostephen is on their staff and basically takes all our suggestions back and gets them actioned ASAP. Only Abit provide direct support on these forums (although there is a DFI employee who pops up occasionally).

Fozzie Bear · 11 Feb 2008 at 12:33

Thanks all for the responses especially the info on the J&W boards (WJA96).

I dont think I can afford the dual Supermicro board and Dual Xeons

so it looks like a P35 and either the Q6600 or Q9450 as suggested. I take your point about access speed of PATA IDE raid and would therefore consider a 80Gb SATA (XP and Vista) boot drive and two smallish (40 -80Gb) SATA drives for my Raid 0 scratch drive.
however I would still like to utilise my two (350Gb) ATA133 single drives for tempory storage of video clips and finished DVDs so would need an Ultra ATA IDE add on card for these (preferably PCIe x1 if anyone knows of a cheap one)

I note that the J&W does not have raid but that the transfer speeds of SATA have been resolved with the latest bios??? Have I read that correctly from your post WJA96 when you say 99% of the issues have been resolved? Is this one of the issues resolved by the bios upgrade?

Bearing in mind what I said about Gigabyte I was thinking of either the Abit IP35 Pro possibly as part of the current OCUK Q6600 bundle or an Asus P5KR both of which support SATA raid and have built in firewire which I need for video capture.
Does anyone have any views on which is the most stable board and also which Ram is best for both boards. I want to upgrade to 4gb ram eventually so would like to ensure I buy compatible 1066Mhz ram from the start.
Finally I would have to out my trusty AGP card and buy a reasonable Vista compatible PCIe video card. Any thoughts for a dual monitor setup, bearing in mind I am not gaming on this machine.
regards