best pc for Vegas Pro 13

[Frank Stevn]

These are my current editing PC specs:

– Six-Core Intel® Core™ i7-980X 3.33GHz
– 6 x Crucial 4GB PC3-10600 1333MHz DDR3
– 1TB SATA 7200RPM – 3.5″ – Seagate Barracuda 7200.12
– 450GB SATA 6.0Gbps 10000RPM – 3.5″ – Western Digital VelociRaptor
– 2 x ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5 (1xDVI, 1xDP, 1xHDMI)

I am working with this PC since 2010. It is a good PC, but I have stuttering preview in Sony Vegas if I set it to Best-Full. I have to set the preview to Best-Auto, in order to be able to edit.

[Heinrich Himmel]

Do NOT do a system upgrade!!! Your 980x is only maybe 30% weaker than a i7 5930!!! You are about on par with an i7 4790.

So here is what affect timeline playback:

CPU
GPU
HDD
RAM

Your RAM and CPU are more than adequate! Your GPU is WEAK and your HDD is average.

Upgrading GPU would make the most difference. For timeline playback, I believe the AMD R9 series is the best. For renders, I believe the AMD HD 6970 is best. Both are considerable upgrades to a 5770.

I recommend you spend about $250 and upgrade your GPU. I would recommend an R9 280x. This can be purchased under $250. I recommend either the Sapphire Tri-X or Gigabyte Windforce. Both have great coolers. If you like a little less on the playback, but more on the renders an HD 6970 would be around $125 and as I said, a considerable upgrade to your 5770!

[Peter Ilyk]

John I was interested to hear that you use a MacBook Pro and edit with Vegas Pro. Presumably this is done using the virtual Windows set up. How well does this work when using Vegas Pro 13? I am certainly tempted to change to Mac as I used it in the past (with Final Cut express) and found it quite trouble free. But I was never certain about using Vegas on Mac with something like Bootcamp. I’ve now become quite used to Vegas Pro and would certainly like to stick with it if it will run trouble free on a Mac Book Pro and Bootcamp. So I’d be very interested in hearing of your experience. Thanks. Peter

[John Rofrano]

[Peter Ilyk] “I was interested to hear that you use a MacBook Pro and edit with Vegas Pro. Presumably this is done using the virtual Windows set up. How well does this work when using Vegas Pro 13? “

I use both Bootcamp and a VMware Fusion virtual machine to run Vegas Pro 13.0 and I haven’t had any problems. The limitation of a virtual machine is that you don’t get GPU support. So if I’m making an edit that doesn’t require a plug-in like Boris Continuum Complete (which uses OpenGL) I will just run Vegas Pro with Fusion and it works out fine. If I do need GPU support, I’ll reboot using Bootcamp and at that point I’m running Windows 7 64-bit on native Intel hardware and it works just as good as it did on my PC workstation.

Since I replied to this thread back in October, I have indeed purchased a Mac Pro as I said I would. I picked up a 2010 Mac Pro 2.93 Ghz 12-Core, 24GB Memory, AMD Radeon HD 5870, 1TB boot + Apple RAID Card w/6TB RAID 5, for $2,275 on eBay. So I no longer have a PC workstation. I only have 2 Mac Pro’s (12-Core & 8-Core), a MacBook Pro (4-Core), and my Mac mini (2-Core).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Peter Ilyk]

Thanks very much for replying John. That’s very useful information. I may go that way myself. Cheers Peter

[John Rofrano]

You’re welcome.

It gives you the best of both worlds. I don’t have to panic when someone asks for a Apple ProRes 422 file anymore (which you can’t create on a PC). I just render a high quality file in Vegas Pro and use Apple Compressor to make a ProRes file on OS X. 😉

Good luck in whatever you decide.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com