Pinnacle 12 new DELL PC about 2 order, HELP!!
 

ok so am I thinking too much here

I have pinnacle ultimate 12 all ready to go, now just need a PC

Was pricing new Dell's I7

I can get a great system with the 920 i7 proc (2.66 ghz)
12gb of ram
1tb hard drive
1.7gb vid card

I keep wavering on spending the extra $450 on upping to the i7 950 (3ghz)

the pinnacle box says only needs you know dual core blah blah of course i dont want the minimum but am i way overstepping what I need with spending the extra $450 going to the 3ghz instead of the 2.66 ghz i7?

Im thinking with the huge vid card and tons of ram that should be more than enough, HELP!!!!!


THanks!


Paul

I just built a new machine with an i7 920 processor and so far it's plenty fast with Studio 12 Ultimate. With uncomplicated HD Divx files rendered from HDV, render time is about the same as run time. I'm also running Magic Bullet Looks without problems for the first time ever. I'm mostly moving on to a 64 bit application but I'll keep using Studio for simple stuff.

Just be aware that a number of Dell models come with crippled BIOS, preventing you to overclock and thus requiring you to get an exorbitantly priced faster CPU (that is where their profit comes from).

A separate i7-950 on nearly any streetcorner is around the same price as Dell charges you for upgrading and they keep the 920. That IMO is stealing you blind.

forgot to mention I have a canon VX10 HD camcorder and will be using avchd format.....

so is 64 bit software better that pinnacle ultimate 12?

All the more reason to maybe forget Dell. AVCHD usually requires a new, faster and much more expensive computer, only they don't tell you that when you buy the camera. i7-920 will not be enough, you need to OC it to make it barely usable and a very good disk setup as well. Start with doubling your budget, because even an i7-950 will normally not do. You need at least an i7-975 Extreme and preferably a dual W5580 or W5590 Xeon system.

JD says it runs fine and you say it doesn't...interesting. For pinnacle it says the minimum specs are core 2 duo... so an i7 with 8 cores isnt enuf???

There is an enormous difference between HDV (as in JD's case) and AVCHD. AVCHD requires far more muscle to edit and even on 8 core machines (i7 is only 4 core plus HT) editing AVCHD is a serious burden.

After hanging around this forum for nearly 9 months I've taken to heart the advice given. Ergo, I'm gonna give up on editing AVCHD cause I'm not prepared to upgrade my home computer system to the levels suggested here. Will content myself with showing AVCHD clips from my Sony SR11 directly on HD TV sets and using my own voice as the source of transitions between scenes. Cant see myself--an amateur hobbyist--investing in horrific levels of computer capacity just to play with AVCHD files. I used to edit Super 8 film...remember, you just cut out the parts you didn't want and glued the rest together. Imagine, you held the film directly in your hands and stored it in a shoe box--not in the bowels of some space age archiving technology that changes every other day. I'm a hobbyist and not a systems analyst so I leave the heavy slogging concerned with NLE editing of AVCHD to the folks who derive their living from it and can deduct the horrific associated expenses from their income tax.

Bye all!