Vegas 10 – Building a Computer to Spec

[Jeff Schroeder]

* Motherboard – X58 chipset with 1366 socket (I like ASUS)

* CPU / Processor – i7 Bloomfield

* Sound Card – (I use on board)

* Video Card NVIDIA GTX Series (I have 2 GTX260’s) attached to these are 2 23″ 1920×1080 ASUS monitors, they are very good on color.

* Ram – an even number divisible by 3. Ram comes in 1,2,and 4 GBs per module. I have 12 (6 x 2GB)

* Harddrive speed and type I have a 60GB SSD for my system drive – It is very fast. If you can afford it. I recommend at least 1 secondary drive and mine are 1-1.5 TB. 7200 rpm, 32MB cache.

* is one Blu-Ray drive better then another? – idk

* case – get one with plenty of fanage!

* any other recommendations – Depending on how many of the video cards you get and how much RAM, you will need from 600-750 watts of power, go for more power, this is where some systems choke.

* you must keep this processor cool. The stock coolers that ship with the i7 do not do a good enough job. Check out: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/heatsink-heatpipe-cpu,2375.html

* I have a esata desktop hard drive slot that I swap project disks into. These are great for archiving to inexpensive drives.

For me a great system is a nice balance of price vs. performance. I do not overclock my systems because usually the throughput is not worth the risk.

Hope this helps,

Jeff

http://www.narrowroadmedia.com

[Bill Mash]

I’m building a system with all parts in transit — to answer your question from my point of view three letters…. AMD. You’ll save $160 over an I7 760 that the Phenom II X6 1055T beats in the encoding test below. AMD motherboards are also slightly less expensive thus you’ll save roughly $180 to spend on HDDs:-)

UP:AMD Phenom II X6 1055T

x264 HD Video Encoding Performance
https://www.anandtech.com/show/3674/amds-sixcore-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-1055t-reviewed/6

Pair the Phenom with a MB that supports USB 3.0, SATA 6 and DDR3 and you’ll be future proof for roughly $30 over the SATA 2 USB 2.0 board (aka older revision) in the Gigabyte example. DDR3 supports faster ram speed and clean resets without much of a price premium (~20%) over DDR2.

MB:GIGABYTE GA-880GMA-UD2H AM3 USB 3.0
RAM: CORSAIR XMS3 8GB DDR3

Operating system is a no-brainer
OS: Windows 7 64-bit professional OEM

Case is VERY subjective
CASE:APEVIA X-QBOII X-QBOII-RD/500

The drive below is 7,200 RPM with 32mb of cache and holds its own respectfully against 10,000k rpm drives with 16 mb of cache for far, far less. The drive has a good track record and is inexpensive. IMHO this choice is a no-brainer as well. I plan on configuring one drive for OS and programs and some localized backups. One for Production Project source media and one for rendering. Once I do some benchmarking I’m going to reconfigure as raid 0 and see what the performance gain is for rendering. The review and video below shed light on this excellent drive at a fantastic price $100 for 1TB at Newegg.com!

https://www.pcshoptalk.com/content.php?199-Western-Digital-RE3-1TB-Hard-Drives/view/6&s=f0da03ad016416a3365ea59ecb26a2c0&

https://www.3dgameman.com/reviews/990/western-digital-re3-1tb-hdd

DRIVES:Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB * 3

The BD optcal drive below is another no-brainer at $120.00 with 10X write speeds to BD. Considering the media I picked up was 4x this drive has headroom and as an added bonus supports HD-DVD of which I have a dozen.

Optical drive: LG Super Multi Blue

Good luck

~Just because you can doesn’t mean you should~

[Frank Black]

Do you guys have any idea why some say that ATI FirePro and AMD in general allows faster performance? I’ve heard this from some yet others say the opposite and the rest say it’s a matter of preference.

Any ideas?

[Bill Mash]

Intel and Nvidia fight like cats and dogs while AMD has owned ATI since 2006. From a gaming perspective it holds a lot of current and future promise. It’s not hard for me to google and see that ATI is winning the gaming battle, good for them. I have a motherboard from AMD coming with onboard ATI video (they all do) with ATI Hybrid Graphics Technology Support. If I was a gamer I wouldn’t even look at a Nvidia card with this motherboard.

From an editing perspective its a mute point as PP and Vegas are coded for Nvidia. The new Adobe Mercury engine requires specific Nvidia cards as does Vegas via the Cuda Engine.

my two cents

~Just because you can doesn’t mean you should~

[Frank Black]

So you’re saying one reason why AMD is good is b/c it owns ATI and works good with it while Intel and Nvidia fight over the way the work w/ each other?

[Bill Mash]

Heck ya that’s what I’m saying. Nvidia is claiming their GPU architecture superior to Intel from a processing perspective. It’s pretty easy to connect the dots here… no need to upgrade your Intel processor just buy a new video card.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/199758/intel_2yearold_nvidia_gpu_outperforms_32ghz_core_i7.html
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/nvidia-launches-anti-intel-web-site/31862

Considering how NVIDIA is squeezed out of the AMD motherboard marker it’s no wonder there highlighting their prowess. A quick look at the most reviewed products on Newegg by mfG shows the top five AMD motherboards all have embedded ATI graphics while Intel motherboards have only one with embedded Nvidia, two with ATI and the other two with none.

CUDA is a make or break architecture for Nvidia plane and simple.

~Just because you can doesn’t mean you should~

[Lance Bachelder]

As far as CPU’s and display cards – please stick with Intel and nVidia – don’t fart around with AMD/ATI stuff for Vegas or CS5! And Avid won’t even launch on an ATI card.

Lance Bachelder
Southern California

[Duane Weed]

I was just going to ask which one I should go with.

Bottom line I want it to work for Vegas.

Thanks everyone, I have been educated 🙂

DW Video & Multimedia, LLC
“Using Today’s Media To Market Your Business”

[Bill Mash]

The price to performance is too compelling to pass up. I read an excellent review yesterday that ended with $500 in parts, OS excluded, to build an editing bay that performs better than the i5 across the board and as good as a low-end i7.

~Just because you can doesn’t mean you should~

[Duane Weed]

Can you share the link to that article if you have it?
thanks
dw

DW Video & Multimedia, LLC
“Using Today’s Media To Market Your Business”