Where to begin, trying to build a PC on a tight budget?

[Chris Borjis]

if it were me?

a new or refurbished Dell workstation.

[Derek Andonian]

If you’re going PC you should get an Nvidia CUDA card. There’s a lot more to choose from and Mercury on CUDA is much more mature, having been out a lot longer. I’m actually not even sure PPro supports OpenCL on the PC side right now. I think it’s just on the MacBook Pros at the moment.

______________________________________________
“THAT’S our fail-safe point. Up until here, we still have enough track to stop the locomotive before it plunges into the ravine… But after this windmill it’s the future or bust.”

[Joseph W. bourke]

These suggestions go over your budget, but VideoGuys always tries to lead you to the best solution, not sell you the hardware:
https://www.videoguys.com/Guide/E/Videoguys+DIY9+Its+Time+for+Sandy+Bridge+E/0xe9b142f408a2b03ab88144a434e88de7.aspx

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Al Bergstein]

I would agree that you might focus on the video card to start. The biggest problem you might face is building something with a large enough power supply and ports to support the growth of your system.

HP and Dell have nice high end, lower end machines, desktops that for well under a $1000 have decent expansion and enough power supply capability to handle a lot of expansion. Try the Dell XPS series for example. You might find a tower refurbished by Dell on their web site.

I did have an HP who’s mother board fried after less than a year. So I went back to Dell towers.

The best long range purchase is a true workstation, with lots of expansion and a large hard drive. While some folks do end up having a good experience building their own, my experience has been that sometimes motherboard driver incompatibilities are not worth the savings. The major players send out updates on the bios, and other issues. Just go to this link at Dell to see that there have been 39 driver updates by Dell on this one model alone. The standalone board makers don’t have to do this kind of support, as they are not integrating the pieces. It can get very aggravating to have to track down problems, and the major vendors do spend money and manpower fixing these issues.
https://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/usgen1

Also, be aware that if you are in a location that has static electricity issues (and most places do), you should at least invest in a static mat and ground yourself if you are working on a motherboard or card. Static is very problematic, and can lead to very hard to troubleshoot random crashes of hardware once you have accidentally zapped a component. When in Arizona a while back, which has really bad static issues due to dry climate, I bought one of these to work on my machine.
https://www.google.com/products/catalog?client=safari&q=anti+static+wrist+strap&oe=UTF-8&cid=12083641902956018804&ei=LpeRT4OgJIzoigTpx6DQBQ&ved=0CDEQrhI

An ounce of prevention and all that…

Al

[Sohrab Sandhu]

Thank you all for your inputs.

Bit the bullet & Inceased the budget to $1500. Built it on my own from memory express.

Can’t wait for pickup on monday!

Sohrab

FCS 3, AJA Kona Lhi & Adobe PPro

“The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.” — Carl Ally

[George Sey]

Get an average system like an i7-920 with 8gb RAM on a low end ASUS board or Gigabit and 1tb and 1+1 hd raid. The differnce in the i7’s are not much when editing. We have an Expensive i7 970 with 24gb Rampage Extreme 3; a 960 with 12gb Rampage 2 and a i7 -920 with 6gb on ASUS Sabertooth. The difference is power is nothing big because the Computers are too big for the software and the processors hardly max out. You spend 1,000 upgrade and gain 5-10%