Computer Geeks - Help Me Build a New Machine

[Chainsaw_Willie]

I've always built my own computers. It's easy and saves a lot of money and they don't come with tons of bloatware...

There seem to be an awful lot of choices out there right now. It's been 5 or 6 years since I built the machine I'm typing this on and at that time the selection of processors and such seemed quite a bit smaller, so I'm hoping the computer savvy among the collective can offer some suggestions.

I have a firm budget of $800. Would like to come in well under that if possible.

I just purchased a copy of Premiere Elements 9 for video editing now that I have a camera that can shoot 720p or 1080p video.

I need a machine with enough horsepower, drive space, and memory to easily handle this task with that program. I see that I can save some money buying a motherboard with a video chipset built in, but not sure if that's a good idea or not. I know in the past it wasn't the ticket for good video performance, is this still true?

Recommendations for the basics: motherboard, processor, and a decent video card if you think it's required would be very helpful.

I'm currently thinking something like the following:

System 1

AMD Phenom II X4 965
ASUS M4A88TD-V
GIGABYTE GV-N450OC-1GI GeForce GTS 450 (? May not be needed. This motherboard comes with onboard video but not sure if it's enough.)


System 2

Intel Core i7-940
Asus Sabertooth X58
GIGABYTE GV-N450OC-1GI GeForce GTS 450


Each system will get 4gb RAM and a 500gb HD. I already have CD/DVD burners I can re-use in my current computer, which I'm guessing is about the only thing besides mouse, keyboard, and monitor that can be reused.

Any suggestions for different system configurations that would save $$$ while still delivering the performance I need, as well as suggestions on the best places to buy this stuff would be appreciated.

Another big factor is reliability. I don't want to use cheap/off-brand components if it will sacrifice reliability or system stability in any way. My current computer has been mostly trouble free the entire time I've had it (Intel processor, Asus motherboard, WD hard drives), I'd like to continue that trend.

TIA!

[bertrenolds]

Get an amd quad core or even six core at this point that is atleast 3.2ghz and you will need more then just 4gb of memory now days. If you plan on editing hd video you should have atleast 8gb of memory if not 12gb but 4gb would get you by, I don't even have 12gb and I use cs3. If you get an amd processory you will spend alot less to get near the same power as an intel processor, I saved my money and went amd. The onboard video card will work but ultimately you should get a real video card, I went ATI. And go with ddr3 1600 if not ddr3 2000 now.

[RShea]

Good choice of brand for the Motherboard. However the 500 gig hard drive seems a bit low (unless you are going to have multiple hard drives in the system- which should be considered if you are going to do serious video editing on the system.) You use one drive for the OS and programs and the other for the data (or 3 hard drives- one for OS, one for the program and swap files, and one for the data)

Other comments include:
If you are going to go with the AMD then move up to the Phenom ii X4 970 or 975 (970 should only add a few dollars and not break your budget, 975 a few more on top of that) The Intel CPU is higher priced than any of the above AMD CPU's. Plus the Asus - AMD motherboard is cheaper than the specified version for the Intel i7 CPU. AMD owns ATI (Graphics chips and video cards) and you may want to also compare one of those if you go with the AMD. The AMD motherboard uses ATI Crossfire for multiple video cards (best to use matching cards in the 2 PCIe 16 slots on that board - if you want to go dual video card that is high end. I'd have to check to see if you could use the on board video and 1 card and still have dual video card set-up (or if the plugging in of the PCIe card would disable and turn off the built in on board video.

DDR3 memory is pretty inexpensive- 4 gig is minimum for serious high end use - the more the better, price out 8 gig also.

[Chainsaw_Willie]

Dual video cards? What would be the point?

Thanks for the input!

Just a note - this isn't "serious" anything. Just a home setup that will let me edit the short videos I can take with my DSLR.

[Wavemanz]

I bought a new 17" Hewlett-Packard DV7-4060US
Notebook with a Tri core AMD Phenom II N830(2.1GHz) and nice ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 1GB DDR3 of video ram and a 750GB 7200rpm HD for $600 new upgraded the DDR 4GB ram to 8GB for another $120 sold my 4GB or ram for $60 for $660 I have a smokin notebook with a HDMI slot Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
3 x 512 KB L2 Cache 4 x USB 2.0 (4th port shared with eSATA) Audio:
Beats Audio and HP Triple Bass Reflex Subwoofer
Integrated digital microphone

Try this link.

http://kickywithit.com/index.php?p=product&id=2025

[Snow Dog]

You haven't mentioned a case or power supply. I reused mine recently and the old ATX PS with 20 pin connector works but overclocking requires a newer PS with 24 pin connector.

Any hard drive you buy should be SATA3 and at least 1TB these days.

Over at www.tomshardware.com you can look at benchmark test of all the different processors. Sometimes the $100 processor is as fast as the $200 processor.

[RShea]

Dual video cards? What would be the point?

Thanks for the input!

Just a note - this isn't "serious" anything. Just a home setup that will let me edit the short videos I can take with my DSLR.

Well both the boards you selected are designed for handling the dual video cards with 2 PCIe slots on them. Hence the mention about it. You can save a bit of money and get a board that does not have the dual PCIe 16 slots on them. I have no way of knowing from the original discussion about the video editing software you have and want to work with for doing video editing of how serious you are... Gamers and others that want a dual monitor set-up (having either 1 screen show one program or have a single program span across both monitors.

[Kip0130]

Dual video cards? What would be the point?

Thanks for the input!

Just a note - this isn't "serious" anything. Just a home setup that will let me edit the short videos I can take with my DSLR.

Two video cards = more bandwidth and horsepower. Resulting in a faster video rendering time, and more than 2 monitors support that one card can output.

[Snow Dog]

Onboard video can be pretty good these days so try it first before going to a separate video card.

If you're using Windows it should be Windows 7 64bit.

If you're using WD drives the Caviar Black is better/higher performance than the Caviar Green. It's the same with other drive makers -- there's a budget line and a performance line.

[milton]

I always recommend buying from newegg.com Feedback section for products is usually helpful. Onboard video has come a long way, but you'll probably still be happier with a discrete video card for editing. If you are re-using your case, check that the video card will fit. The new ones can be ginormous.

Don't skimp on your PSU, buy a good brand like FSP, SeaSonic, or Corsair. ( http://educations.newegg.com/tool/psucalc/index.html )

++Win7 64-bit

Check this thread for more info on current build options...
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtop...?f=8&t=1136380

If you go with Intel, be aware there is a bug in their 6-series Sandy Bridge chipset that may cause SATA-II (3 Gb/s) ports to degrade over time. Motherboards with the fix should be shipping in April.

[advres]

Don't by a 'green' drive. Get at least a 1TB... 500GB is nothing in regards to Digital Video.

With a quad core processor and 4GB of ram, any app that has multiprocessor enabled the machine will slow down to a crawl. I would never have any less than 2GB per core at any time and that is the bare minimum these days. Right now I have a quad core with 16GB and it runs nicely when working in MP enabled apps. I used an 8-core machine with higher clock speeds but less ram and the same project came to a screaching halt on that machine while my machine will blaze through it.

[bertrenolds]

Very true when it comes to memory. The green drives are not that bad and if you have 6 drives like myself having a green drivecuts down on the power bill but yes it is a bit slower. It seems the cool thing now days to do is have you operating system on a solid state drive and then everything else on disk drives.

[advres]

I agree that green drives aren't bad if used for the proper thing. I use green drives for data backup, music server drives and movie drive (watching, not cutting) but would never use them for a system drive or a video media drive. Once running they are fine but when they are in hibernation they take forever to "wake-up". This is most noticeable when nothing is running and I try to access a song after a while. Takes several seconds to spin up and start playing.

And like stated, the OS on an SSD is the fastest and all the rage these days. It has extended the life of many machines though to just be too slow nowadays. But depending on additional cards they may be more harmful than useful. My buddy was building some edit suites for Brain Farm and he found the SSD system drives booted so quickly that the network card drivers didn't have time to load on boot so they couldn't access their shared media SAN. Obviously this is a rare situation, but he took the SSDs out of the Mac Pro suites he was building. But he loves it in his MBP.

[Hypnotoad]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/20479
Always a good place to start.

[Chainsaw_Willie]

Hypnotoad - good read, thanks for the link. Interesting that they only equip the systems up to the $1K system with only 4gb RAM. Given how cheap memory is, I suppose 8gb is a wise investment.

I do plan to re-use my case but will need a new power supply.

Remember, I'm on a budget and this is just for home use. Getting fancy with things like an SSD *and* a separate HD only makes things more expensive. This old machine takes awhile to boot yet I have no complaints, I'm not generally in that big of a hurry. I'm sure the new machine will boot much faster and that's good enough for me.

Thanks for input so far.

[advres]

But you did mention editing. You should never have the footage you are cutting coming from your system drive.

[stuckathuntermtn]

Check the build combos on New Egg. Solid options either way, but I think Intel and nVidea may have one me back. My i5 machine rules. It's a dual core rated at 3.2GHz. I wouldn't normally OC anything, but changing one setting on Asus motherboard makes adjust so it's compatible with the GSkill DDR3-1600 that I also have, and it's running over 3.8 on stock cooling without a hint of trouble. You should also find out how many cores your software of choice is programed to use. Paying extra for more, and slower cores is pointless if your software won't use them.
Make sure you get Windows 7 x64.
When you're ready for a real game, get Arma2: Combined Operations.

[milton]

Check the build combos on New Egg. Solid options either way, but I think Intel and nVidea may have one me back. My i5 machine rules. It's a dual core rated at 3.2GHz. I wouldn't normally OC anything, but changing one setting on Asus motherboard makes adjust so it's compatible with the GSkill DDR3-1600 that I also have, and it's running over 3.8 on stock cooling without a hint of trouble. ..

Sweet..Intel has been kicking ass since core2duo came out. I'm running an E6600 stock 2.4 Ghz @ 3.4. Been that way on air for going on 4 years, not one blue screen. Nvidia has always had better drivers. Recently upgrade the video card to a GTX460. Crysis 2 demo even runs smooth.

[bertrenolds]

I agree that green drives aren't bad if used for the proper thing. I use green drives for data backup, music server drives and movie drive (watching, not cutting) but would never use them for a system drive or a video media drive. Once running they are fine but when they are in hibernation they take forever to "wake-up". This is most noticeable when nothing is running and I try to access a song after a while. Takes several seconds to spin up and start playing.

And like stated, the OS on an SSD is the fastest and all the rage these days. It has extended the life of many machines though to just be too slow nowadays. But depending on additional cards they may be more harmful than useful. My buddy was building some edit suites for Brain Farm and he found the SSD system drives booted so quickly that the network card drivers didn't have time to load on boot so they couldn't access their shared media SAN. Obviously this is a rare situation, but he took the SSDs out of the Mac Pro suites he was building. But he loves it in his MBP.

I'm just waiting for the time to be right to go solid state. I wonder about file recovery, is it like a flash card that gets corrupted and you lose everything? I feel like with a disk drive you stand a way better chance to recover lost files.
And stick with 3gbs hard drives for now I guess, that's what I have. I bet a black edition 955 quad core amd is pretty cheap these days, you can overclock it big time but I havn't had to, http://www.google.com/products/catal...d=0CCoQ8wIwAg#
And you can get by on 4gb and buy more memory later when they have 4gbx2 sticks for $100

[RShea]

Sweet..Intel has been kicking ass since core2duo came out. I'm running an E6600 stock 2.4 Ghz @ 3.4. Been that way on air for going on 4 years, not one blue screen. Nvidia has always had better drivers. Recently upgrade the video card to a GTX460. Crysis 2 demo even runs smooth.

Yes, Intel has a bit of a memory bridge advantage going to the DDR memory with their design- iX cores even more than the older Core2Duo or first round of Quad Core chips.
The Intel black eye right now as pointed out is the chipsets with Sandy Bridge- recalled and reworking some things. NVidia has had better drivers - but ATI which used to really suck for stable drivers in years gone by, has come a long way with the AMD merger. Plus as I stated if you are going AMD CPU and motherboard, you need to at least know which dual video standard your board can handle- ATI - CrossFireX, or NVidia uses SLI and match them up.
There are a few AMD series motherboards out there that will allow you to "unlock" some of the AMD CPU's also if you are into that sort of thing (similar to overclocking)- you purchase a smaller number of Core chip and then the Motherboard company uses their tools to release the locked cores-
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd...-cpu,8012.html
For ATI video cards- read up on them for your use (Tomshardware and other sites as well as this link):
http://www.amd.com/us/products/deskt...me-choose.aspx

[RShea]

I'm just waiting for the time to be right to go solid state. I wonder about file recovery, is it like a flash card that gets corrupted and you lose everything? I feel like with a disk drive you stand a way better chance to recover lost files.
And stick with 3gbs hard drives for now I guess, that's what I have. I bet a black edition 955 quad core amd is pretty cheap these days, you can overclock it big time but I havn't had to, http://www.google.com/products/catal...d=0CCoQ8wIwAg#
And you can get by on 4gb and buy more memory later when they have 4gbx2 sticks for $100

The SSD drives and USB flash drives actually use very similar technology for their memory. Biggest issue you have with SSD drives is they have a maximum number of write cycles they can handle. The other issues are mechanical device vs electronic. Only price and mainly capacity right now is keeping the traditional hard drives around. Nobody can build an affordable 500 gig SSD drive with the technology of today. Read up on it like this discussion:
http://www.technize.com/ssd-vs-hdd-comparison/ And for files that have hundreds or more of changes to them in a day SSD is not recommended due to the limits of the max write cycles. But an OS file may not change or get written to for months until an update of some sort is available or a newer version is written- hence for the smaller capacity needs of an OS drive they are all the rage due to the loading speeds- but you have to have a bigger budget for sure over the same capacity HD.
For fast and worry free data storage SSD is there today (backup is still needed of course in case of power, static or file structure, virus or human error like over writing a wrong file issues in the OS with SSD drives still, but hard drives are still prone to mechanical failure as well as the media being damaged due to shock or vibration and all the above.

The memory price you ask for can be had right now (even cheaper than $100- depending on the chip speed):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145315

[RShea]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/20479
Always a good place to start.

Not a bad read- but a few of their comments such as liking the Samsung hard drives I would question. It has been a while since I have found Samsung drives as reliable as some other brands on the market (with a better warranty too as pointed out). At least they are honest mentioning about their Newegg connections and sponsorship.

[RShea]

Hypnotoad - good read, thanks for the link. Interesting that they only equip the systems up to the $1K system with only 4gb RAM. Given how cheap memory is, I suppose 8gb is a wise investment.

I do plan to re-use my case but will need a new power supply.

Remember, I'm on a budget and this is just for home use. Getting fancy with things like an SSD *and* a separate HD only makes things more expensive. This old machine takes awhile to boot yet I have no complaints, I'm not generally in that big of a hurry. I'm sure the new machine will boot much faster and that's good enough for me.

Thanks for input so far.

Hopefully your existing case that you plan on reusing has a good design that is still considered thermally advantaged for the new higher end processors and drives, etc. you are going to stick in it. Unless the case is a high end aluminum or similar non-steel case, you will not save a huge amount over purchasing a new case and power supply combination. A good 500-600 watt lifetime warranty power supply should probably be a starting point (depending on how many hard drives and devices you are going to have in this new build).

[Chainsaw_Willie]

But you did mention editing. You should never have the footage you are cutting coming from your system drive.

Why?

I'm just an unfrozen caveman skier who needs a computer to process his pics, short video clips, and a little music. All this tech mumbo-jumbo frightens and confuses me, so the KISS principle is in full effect here.

[RShea]

Why?

I'm just an unfrozen caveman skier who needs a computer to process his pics, short video clips, and a little music. All this tech mumbo-jumbo frightens and confuses me, so the KISS principle is in full effect here.

The data transfer has to be able to keep up or you drop frames... think of a single elevator handling all the traffic for a building versus multiple elevators that can have one going up and another going down. http://www.videoguys.com/Guide/E/Vid...ce243a6c6.aspx You also have the rendering of the video which requires having the software and the video stream both at hand and available to work right.