New system question for CS5

[Todd Kopriva]

(I’m not up to date on what is a reasonable price, so I’m ignoring that.)

I’d put more RAM in there for After Effects, but otherwise it looks pretty good.

After Effects CS5 can make good use of as much RAM as you can cram into the computer, but a good rule of thumb is 3GB installed per processor core. With the virtual cores from hyperthreading, your 6-core machine effectively has 12 processor cores. So, that’s 36GB. Sure, you can make do with less, and your 12GB will be fine, but you’ll only be able to use a few of your cores at a time for Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing, and you may struggle with large-format material in Dynamic Link.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Brian Louis]

A tad pricey

In addition to what Todd was saying about ram memory, I’d loose the fx3800 for a fx4000, 2gigs of video memory vice 1gig, DDR5 vice DDR3, the DDR5 can give up to a 50% performance boost.

[Eric Jurgenson]

You do have an a system drive in addition to the two 2TB video drives, right?

The single SATA drives for video will be the bottleneck for the system. You may want to consider an array at some point.

[Tombabauta]

I’d save the money from the Quadro cards for a GTX470, which is already officially supported by CS5.

[Brian Louis]

Hi Tom:
The Fermi 470 is a good call if you are just using Ppro/Encore CS5 but Rex mentioned CS5 “Suite” in his OP, so I was keeping the video card in the same class because unless he was just doing low end graphics and compositing with AFX, PS, and Illustrator the quadro cards would be a better call, like I use a GTX 260 in my editing workstation, and quadros in graphics workstations, I’m using the GTX 260 because when I put the current work station together there were very few DDR5 cards and it was for Ppro CS4

[Rex Summerfield]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. It was incorporated into the final specs for the system. At this time I think I’m swapping the Intel i7 980X for dual quad core Xenon processors because of the 24MB RAM limitation on the i7 chipset. With the two quad core Xenon’s I can go as high as 96GB. I have the system out for bid right now. Just wanted say thanks to everyone for the input.