Adobe Premiere and a computer to support it

[Alex Jusay]

Hey, I have successfully installed Premiere Pro on a dual PIII 733Mhz with 512Mb ram (before installing it on our office workstation) for testing, and it worked flawlessly. It was fast and there was no lag. We were able to finish a lot of projects without any problems. It made us wonder why we bought a killer machine for premiere pro–until of course we added effects. Unfortunately, Premiere Pro 2 would not install on that dual P3 coz it was looking for a specific CPU instruction. My suggestion is to go to VAR sites and check out their specs.

[John Baum]

Basically for video get as fast as you can afford. Any type will work fine. Though the Xeons usually have a larger cache which does help encoding and rendering speeds a bit.
You should check out the new Core 2 Duo chips. They are currently the fastest chips you can get and not too expensive. And don’t let the lower clock speeds fool you. They are designed differently then previous intel chips so even though they have a lower clock speed they are still faster.

The more RAM you have the faster and smoother your video app will run. Hard drive capacity and speed are also very important. At the very least you should have a seperate drive just for your media files.

[Chixwithtrix]

alright, thanks for the replies (I’ve had no others on other foums :()

So, I still do not understand the Xeons being server processors…what makes a server machine different from a normal home machine (more expensive, more power capability?)? What is the differene between a server board and a normal board?

thanks!

[Alex Jusay]

I agree with ghobii, get the Core Duo. Xeons, besides having a larger cache, also has several CPU instructions and extensions ideal for server operations (aka background task). If you search hard enough, you’ll find XEON Premiere users NOT noticing a big difference in performance than their counterparts. I used to work in an HP XW series Avid Adrenaline machine with the dual Xeon and it was really fast, although we cant really tell if its the xeons or the Adrenaline hardware plus the RAID setup.

[John Baum]

Server hardware in general is more robust. Higher quality components since servers generally need to run 24/7 with a high degree of reliability. They may also contain extra components that allow redundant power supplies, high speed disk arrays, optimised I/O…there is nothing on them that would make them a bad choice for video editing. Quite the opposite. But unless you are in a very busy work enviorment where your workstation is busy all day everyday you may be paying for more then you need.