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Premiere Pro CS5 optimized system
Hello fellow Creative Cow folks;
I hope you don’t mind me picking your brains as I am trying to determine system configurations for my clients. I’ve been mostly configuring HP Z-series based systems for our clients (Z800 and Z400 and xw-series before that), however CS5 and its GPU acceleration prompts me to offer purely custom systems as HP has nothing to offer to budget-minded professionals and enthusiasts.
By that, I mean a Core i7 system with enough power to handle a GTX 460 or 470 card and a few hard drives – which seems like a “sweet spot” to me. All of the HP “workstation” class system are Xeon based, and only the expensive dual socket Z600 and Z800 have enough power to handle a GTX 470.
Would you agree that a system with i7-960, GTX460 and 12GB RAM is the “sweet spot” configuration for a budget system that is optimized for Premiere Pro CS5?
Let me qualify “sweet spot”:
– balance of affordability and power, i.e. it’d be difficult to add power without dramatically increasing cost
– good stability and support for all components
– professional appearance: not too ugly, not over the top designHere is a configuration that I think is today’s sweet spot:
– Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
– 700W PSU, Mid Tower Chassis
– Intel Core i7-950 or i7-960 CPU
– NVidia GeForce GTX 460 or GTX 470 Graphics
– 12GB triple-channel RAM (6GB for those with relatively simple projects)
– 500GB – 1TB Boot Drive
– 2-6TB media array (2-3 drives 1-2TB each)A system such as this is about $2-2.5K give or take a hundred or two, before adding the cost of Premiere Pro or Production Premium. A similarly configured HP Z800 with Xeon X5650 will likely run at least $2k more (it starts at about $3K before for a base configuration).
Do you agree that the Core i7 configuration above is fairly close to a “sweet spot” for a budget system that is still well optimized for Premiere Pro CS5 and its MPE?
Thanks!
Alex
DV411 -
8 Replies
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Hi Alex,
Sounds like you’re on the right track. That’s almost the same exact system I have (i7-930, 12GB RAM, but I have a junk video card) and I’m very happy with it. I ended up buying separate components and building my own system, after pricing out pre-made options, including HP workstations. The only upgrade I would make to my system is to get a CUDA equipped video card to use the Mercury Playback Engine.
For your media RAID, you might want to think about not using the motherboard’s RAID controller, and rather use an “external” RAID controller. I’ve also found my media RAID to be plenty large: it’s four 1TB drives in a RAID5 configuration, so that gives me just about 2.8TB of usable space. I backup projects on external drives, so I only have my current project on the media RAID. I mainly edit DVCPRO HD 720p60 and AVCHD 1080i60 footage, so this is plenty of space for me. Those editing higher res footage may need more space. Here’s a good RAID calculator:
https://www.ibeast.com/content/tools/RaidCalc/RaidCalc.aspI guess the big question is: what will your clients do with this system? What kind of footage do they typically edit, are you using After Effects heavily, etc.
Mike Tomei
Intel i7-930 2.8GHz
12 GB RAM
1 GB VRAM
Adobe Production Premium CS5
https://www.miketomei.com -
Thanks Mike – good points about an add-on controller for RAID levels other than 0 and 1, and using non-MPE graphics where it’s unnecessary.
Would you agree that for SD and light duty HDV editing, hardware-based MPE won’t be all that critical? Taking it off will shave $300-500 off the total – which may make sense to those editors.
The imaginary customer for this “sweet spot” hardware MPE system will primarily use Premiere Pro and related apps (Encore, ME) for medium and light duty SD and HD projects – HDV, H.264, AVC-I. Heavy After Effects use is not anticipated but the system will handle it, and can be upgraded to use more RAM, a “pro” graphics card, and redundant storage if necessary.
It’s designed to be a “value” proposition to most budget-minded editors looking for a new system: i.e. it’d be hard to get a similar or better system for less money, and you’d need to spend quite a bit more to get a significantly better system.
Anticipated service life – 3-5 years.
Alex
DV411 -
Alex:
You don’t need to buy an expensive NVidia card to get MPE. Lesser cards also work if you do the “hack”. We are using a GTX 285 and it is running MPE without issue.
Search this forum for Mercury Playback Engine Hack and you’ll find it.
Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS -
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on the subject of CUDA enabled cards, are they all as physically large as the 470? I bought a 470 but can’t fit it in my case because of a silly ventilation system that can’t be removed. Are there any slightly smaller cuda cards?
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How much clearance do you need – i.e. what’s the maximum length of the card that will fit?
All of the supported GeForce cards are full-length (9.75″), dual slot. Among supported Quadro cards, FX3800 and 4000 a single-slot. FX3800 is 9′ long, 4000 – 9.5′. Dual slot cards are usually 9.75″ long.
Alex
DV411 -
thanks very much for your reply, I’ve only just returned to this thread despite thinking about this issue every day! I dont think I expected anyone to reply on this.
I have just checked and I could get away with the 9″ long or possibly just about the 9.5″ but as long as they’re not thicker than 1″. There is a ridiculous heat sink in the way which is causing all of the problems. There is also no expansion slots above the PCI-E so that instantly rules out all double slot cards as I believe its always the case that the card is on the bottom and the spare slot above it
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[David Payne] “There is a ridiculous heat sink in the way which is causing all of the problems. There is also no expansion slots above the PCI-E so that instantly rules out all double slot cards as I believe its always the case that the card is on the bottom and the spare slot above it”
Could you post a photo of your case open, maybe?
Alex (DV411)
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