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EDIT: I just say that you don't need to pay VAT :o

EDIT2: Spent the rest of the money on a larger monitor. I think it's a darn good spec for video editing. The GPU is decently fast for OpenGL accelerated 2D, the monitor is big, it's got 640 GiB storage space, and there's 4 GiB RAM and a quad core Xeon processor.

EDIT3: Crap, I had an AGP card in there :o
 
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I'm not going to spec you as i'm not up to date with the latest and greatest hardware but i'll give a few pointers i've learned building edit boxes.

2. If you must go with vista I'd go for the safe supported option with Vista 32 as even studio 11 is only recommended for 32bit so far.

3. Having the system and video drives as part of the same physical array is a bad idea. The best cheap solution is to have 1 System drive + 2 Mirrored Video drives, which will give redundancy and great read performance. I have lost lots of work in the past due to HD's dieing that i can only recommend redundant raid for production environments.
 
maybe look at swapping the memory to the OCZ 4GB (2 x 2GB) PC2-5400 Dual Channel Vista Upgrade Gold Series This Week Only Offer (was £144.99 ex vat)
£139.99 £164.49 inc VAT.

as mentioned get a smaller system drive then possibly look at raiding 2 larger storage drives.
 
Best thing to do it get a smallish system drive for the os and apps, say a 120gb drive or something, then have a drive for storage (possibly 2 500gb drives in a raid 1 mirrored array) (or just have 1 if you have everything backed up on the dv tapes) and then get another drive for rendering, around 250gb should be ok.

2gb RAM should be fine, I'm managing to edit HDV 1080i footage on 2gb ram and a now very old a64 3200+! will hopefully upgrade to a core2duo 6600 at some point this month but this is because I want to play games too. In fact that might be a better idea for this system as well, I don't think you'd see much of an advantage using quad core for simple editing especially as I can edit HDV on a single core although not ideal.

Graphics card doesn't really do much at all so just get whatever's cheapest.

That's all I can say for now, I'm still looking into motherboards.
 
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Kermit said:
Thanks for all your help (especially Billy) and unless anyone can offer an further improvements I may well be going for exactly what Billy has spec'd
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It's probably worth it to do as others have suggested and get a small (80 GiB?) SATA2 drive for the OS and applications then use the pair of 320s in RAID1 for data safety.
Kermit said:
Isn't the Xeon 3200 being a 64Bit cpu going to be crippled by running the 32Bit version of Vista and or is this Xeon (or at least its more pricey slightly faster other variants) the best cpu all round atm and not just specified due to Video performance?
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Running in 32-bit won't cripple it though 64-bit does enable a few more registers. You probably won't notice a difference unless you're trying to address a lot of RAM. I don't know how that mobo will handle addressing 4 GiB RAM when paired with a 32-bit OS. I spec'd the quad core for a few reasons. First, video rendering is easy to parallelize so it will benefit immensely from more cores. Second, this is a high-end workstation you're building so I thought it deserved an equally high-end processor. Third, the X3210 is a fantastic deal ATM and it the cheapest way to get a quad core processor.
Kermit said:
^^ I'll try rephrase that, are the hard core gamers here also opting for these quad core Xeon's these days over the P4 Duo's and AMD equivalent as I've always assumed older generation Xeon's were best suited to servers but maybe thats changed with the arrival of quad core?
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Xeons are intended for servers and workstations. This IS a workstation. The reason gamers are jumping on these recently is that it's the cheapest way to get a quad core. Xeons/Opterons have a reputation, whether deserved or not, for overclocking very well because, supposedly, they're made of the cream-of-the-crop silicon.

I hope that addressed your concerns. :)

EDIT: IF you have to cut anything from the build to afford the 2nd hard disk, go for a cheaper DVD-RW drive before axing anything else.

EDIT2: The Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB ST3200820AS SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM seems to fit the bill nicely for the OS drive. :)
 
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I'd recommend you have the following in your spec:

RAID 0 array for footage and rendering
Powerful CPU
2 gig memory

I'm a user of Premier Pro, and the latest versions can take advantage of a powerful graphics card for improved rendering, you'd need to check compatibility though.

EDIT: And a widescreen monitor is essential, larger the better, 24" is a particulary good match
 
BillytheImpaler said:
First, video rendering is easy to parallelize so it will benefit immensely from more cores.
Click to expand...

Do you know if Premier has been written for multiple cores? I agree with your point, but I'm not sure if Adobe etc have actually reworked their software to work like this.

I hope I'm mistaken, because it would be a good reason to upgrade to a Core2.

Regards,

Michael
 
premiere pro uses multiple cores :)

Anyway I would go for something similar to this (yes I know its a little over budget but the extra is worth it)


Seasonic M12 Modular 700W Silent ATX2.0 Power Supply £114.99
(£135.11) £114.99
(£135.11)
OCZ 4GB (2 x 2GB) PC2-5400 Dual Channel Vista Upgrade Gold Series DDR2 (OCZ2VU6674GK) £139.99
(£164.49) £279.98
(£328.98)
Microsoft Windows Vista Business 64-Bit Edition DVD - OEM - 1Pk (66J-02373) £74.99
(£88.11) £74.99
(£88.11)
Samsung SM-206BW 20" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Silver/Black £184.99
(£217.36) £184.99
(£217.36)
Scythe Infinity Heatpipe CPU Cooler (Socket 478, 775, AM2, 754, 939, 940) £26.99
(£31.71) £26.99
(£31.71)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB ST3320620AS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM £49.99
(£58.74) £199.96
(£234.96)
Lian Li C-01B Aluminium CD-ROM/DVD-ROM Bezel (Black) £7.99
(£9.39) £7.99
(£9.39)
LG GSA-H42NBRL 18x18 DVD±RW ReWriter (Black, Beige) - Retail £19.99
(£23.49) £19.99
(£23.49)
Abit AW9D-MAX Intel 975X (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £104.99
(£123.36) £104.99
(£123.36)
Lian-Li PC-7 PLUS Aluminium Midi-Tower Case - Black £49.99
(£58.74) £49.99
(£58.74)
EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £119.99
(£140.99) £119.99
(£140.99)
Intel Xeon 3200 Series X3210 "LGA775 Kentsfield" 2.13GHz (1066FSB) - Retail £244.99
(£287.86) £244.99
(£287.86) Sub Total : £1,429.84

Now the 4 hard drives - 2 in raid 0 for video scratch disk, 8 gig of ram to boost video editting performance. Other hard drives - 1 for os, 1 for page file etc.

Now obviously you can cut out half the ram which would save you £140 and if the 1200 was strict knock out one of the hard drives.

EDIT - screw up with spec :s
 
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8gb of ram is overkill for this machine, you'd only need that amount of ram for rendering huge amounts of data and special fx etc, from the sounds of it this guy is just doing straight forward editing without using lots of effects so I think 2gb would be sufficient.
 
michael baxter said:
Premier
Click to expand...
Having had a quick look around it appears that most of Pro CS3 is multithreaded but some parts of it are legacy and are not multithreaded. IF you upgraded to a C2D I bet you'd be very happy with the decision. :)
 
Sirrel Squirrel said:
8gb of ram is overkill for this machine, you'd only need that amount of ram for rendering huge amounts of data and special fx etc, from the sounds of it this guy is just doing straight forward editing without using lots of effects so I think 2gb would be sufficient.
Click to expand...

well 8GB is not overkill if after effects etc are used, but I did say it can be knocked down to 4GB - 2GB is barely enough these days in my view on workstations.
Also with a quad core cpu there is the option of rendering 2 things at once so the additional ram is useful.
 
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