[Michael Rizzo]

Chris,

You’ve got a pretty solid parts list there. Good work. A few points:

1. I love that case, provides a lot of room to work with and guys like us end up filling up our hard drive bays.

2. Monitor, hard drives and SSD are all solid.

3. Video Card will actually speed up your render times under Vegas 11 if the propaganda is correct. I’m a gamer as well who has always maintained two separate machines and never bothered to put heavy graphics in the workstation, but that may be money well spent this time around.

4. I think the sound card is a waste of money. Any decent motherboard has pretty good sound these days. Unless you’re the sound engineer on a VERY high level production, I doubt you’ll hear anything different with the sound card.

5. Cooler Master makes a decent PSU. I don’t settle for decent PSUs in my computers. A power supply is the one thing you should spend extra money on to be absolutely certain you don’t have a problem. I recommend Corsair or PC Power & Cooling, and for this rig, 750 watts is more than plenty (I run a PC Power 750 in a machine very similar to yours and it’s wildly underutilized).

6. I would spring for a Z68 motherboard. I prefer Gigabyte boards myself from years of building experience. There are a few minor features that could come in handy like SSD caching. But this isn’t that big of a deal.

7. Love that CPU fan, it’s on my system right now. Bargain.

8. Red LED fans are dumb. Just use whatever they give you. Although in the case of the HAF I think those have LEDs too.

I would install the OS and Vegas on your SSD for fast application loading times.

I keep my raw footage cataloged in a series of 2TB drives by client and shoot. I render to a separate 1TB drive for finished projects and working edits.

You’re in very good shape so far. The 2600K is the chip to get right now. 16GB of ram is overkill, but cheap, so who cares? I can’t say anything you’ve picked is explicitly a bad idea. Just think about those few suggestions I made.

[Michael Rizzo]

Steve,

Thanks for the tip!

I downloaded and installed 10, and it seems to be rendering fine now.

Up until this point I found preview playback very slow with the Nikon clips. (AVCHD and h.264 are both so heavily compressed it’s hellish on a CPU)

Did you find preview playback any smoother in Vegas 10 than Vegas 9?

Thanks again,

Mike

[Michael Rizzo]

Sorry, didn’t include some important info:

I’m running Vegas Pro 9.0e 64-bit on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.

Again, the system is an i7, 4GB ram, GeForce 8800GTS video card.