Computer Specs

[Steve Modica]

As long as you have PCIE slots.

Storage is a huge bottleneck on all this stuff and if you need many Terabytes, you’ll need some sort of RAID card. SSD’s are very fast, but *good* SSDs are going in the 10-40K per TB range right now. You’ll need a lot of spinning disks to do many TB in realtime. (8 or so)

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Hamid Rohi-bilverdy]

Okay. To start with my HD footages wont be that long clips, so storage is something I can add on later, but I agree with you regarding good SSD. When the time comes to upgrade to a better camera I will difently get some faster spinning disk.

But what about the rest of the specs I put up there, are those suitable?

Hamid

[Steve Modica]

If I personally were buying a system and the idea was “the fastest thing I could get for the money”, I’d go with a 5500 chipset and the Westmere (5600) processor. You get three memory channels instead of 2 and more cores. Assuming you’re running Windows, you will get a lot of the parallelims benefits they put in. Blue Screens can appear twice as fast!

Just make sure to populate the memory in banks of 3, not 4. Or the system will drop down to 2 memory channels. So you want 12, 24, 48 etc.

That’s a server chip and it’s in the mac pros. (I think you get more PCIE channels in that too)

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Hamid Rohi-bilverdy]

Yes I will be running on a windows OS. When you say “the fastest thing I could get for the money”, well the reason I choose these settings were mainly because it was a price which affordable. Not to cheap, nor the most expensive one. All the hardware is from a swedish company.

The chipset which you refer to, that would probrably blow my budget twice 🙂

Regarding the ram, is 24 sufficient enough?

[Walter Soyka]

[Hamid Rohi-Bilverdy] “I am not sure if I should go with the 16 GB ram or should I choose 24GB?”

I think you could get by with 16 GB, but I’d consider it the minimum amount for your system. If you can afford to, go for 24 GB.

[Hamid Rohi-Bilverdy] “Grapfic: ATI Radeon HD 5770 – 1 GB – OpenGL, DirectX 11”

A fancy graphics card will not accelerate After Effects rendering. There are a handful of plugins which can use GPU acceleration, but I prefer to use multiprocessing anyway.

Premiere Pro’s Mercury Playback Engine can use hardware acceleration if you have a supported, CUDA-enabled NVIDIA graphics card. If you’ll be using that, I’d consider a GTX 470 instead of the ATI 5770.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Nick Findlater]

My computer spec is:

AMD Phenom II x6 1055T 6 core processor
14GB DDR3 1333
2x 65GB SSD in raid for windows
2x 1.5TB SATA hard drives in raid for storage.

I have no problems with after effects it is pretty fast for whatever I am doing.

4GB sticks of DDR 3 have dropped quite a bit at the moment. I would have put 16GB in but for some reason the motherboard wouldn’t take it even though it said it would. The most I could fit was 14GB

You should be able to pick up 4GB sticks for £35 easily

[Hamid Rohi-bilverdy]

I found a text about the best grapfic card for the adobe suite CS4

” The NVIDIA® Quadro® CX is the accelerator for Adobe® Creative Suite® 4—giving creative professionals the performance, tools, and reliability they need to maximize their creativity.”

What would be suggestet as if not the best then more than reasonable grapfic card for the 64 bit CS5?

[David Johnson]

Steve,
Could you explain this a little further: “populate the memory in banks of 3, not 4. Or the system will drop down to 2 memory channels. So you want 12, 24, 48 etc.”

Perhaps it’s just the word “banks” that’s confusing me … do you mean fill 3 slots at a time instead of four or use RAM in 3Gb increments instead of 4Gb increments? Both seem counter to my current understanding so I want to understand what you mean and the reason.

[Steve Modica]

In the 8 and 12 bay systems, there are 3 memory controller channels. So having three slots populated is what you want. Not 4.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Hamid Rohi-bilverdy]

I have decided to go with 24 GB ram instead of 16 GB.

Also I changed the grapfic card to a:

Grapfic Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 – 1.5 GB – DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.0

One last thing, I am confused which CPU to choose.

The original was:

CPU: INTEL Core i7 950 / 3.06 GHz – Quad Core

Now I have looked at this with 2 x CPU, so I get 8 cores.

CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5506 / 2.13 GHz – LGA1366 Socket – L3 4 MB – Box

I am just not sure which benifits I will get with 8 cores instead of a one CPU with 4 cores but faster.

I mean this is a 2.13 GHz. Also if I want to drive some heavy games from time to time, then the 3.06 GHz would be nice to drive those games.

Please advice….

Regards HRB