What kind of PC config handles HD?

[Dave Haynie]

Pretty good. The system I’m running was a quickie replacement. Last November, my Q9550 main board self-destructed. I needed a replacement that day (it was Friday, I had lots of weekend work looming on video projects), so I ran to Microcenter.. about the only place in the South Jersey/Philly area with New Egg or Frys competitive prices.

Anyway, the 1090T (fastest at the time from AMD), main board, and 8GB DDR3 DRAM ran me about $425. Not too shabby, but it looks like you get another few hundred MHz today (is that a 1100T?) for a bit less. Of course, the “Bulldozer” CPUs are on the way… mixed reviews so far. But unless you’re spending big, it’s all about performance for the price, not absolute performance.

-Dave

[Diane Sosnoski]

Stephen,
I called SCS this morning and they sent me the upgrade to Vegas Pro 11, DVD Architect Pro 5.2 and NewBlueFX Titler Pro at no charge.
Thank you so much for the suggestion!

[Mike Brennan]

Thanks for the tip Steven ! I’ll have to look up my purchase date, I may qualify.
Mike

[Mike Brennan]

Hello Diane.

I recently purchased an ADK 2600K system. It has an intel extreme motherboard.
I have win 7 64 bit and 8 gigs of ram. I went with a cost effective invidea 550 card, but now that
GPU acceleration is a “work in progress”, I’d splurge for a better video card. Two monitors ( or more) is a great addition to your system. The faster the CPU, the better. The current 2600K will still lag under heavy load in an HD project. It all depends on the project and settings.

I have 4 internal Caviar Black 1TB drives. one for OS, one for source, one for rendering, and one for audio. I could use a few more! The extra drives help eliminate bottlenecks.

The one down side to the current 2600K is the bus structure. You’ll rob bandwidth from your video card
if you were to install something like a raid controller on the other side of that buss. With that being said, if you are not planning on doing something like that, the 2600K offers lots of bang for the buck.

As for the 8 gigs of ram, you can get two 4 gig sticks and add two more later when you need it.
If memory serves me (no pun intended) the new chips will have to match the old chips for proper operation. I could see a need for more than 8 gigs at some point, but for now it’s been plenty.

Good luck,
Mike