Slapping Together a New PC Editing Workstation
 

Very excited! I finally broke down and ordered all the parts I need to move up to a new PC. The last one I built has served me very well and still works well, but I decided it was time for some specific upgrades, including...

Best CPU I can afford right now - Intel 3.4Ghz Prescott pushed by the top performing Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard
Bump up to a Gig of RAM
Dual 250G SATA drives for data in RAID 1 - I'm always so nervous about losing data!

And also some other miscellaneous upgraded items including a case that looks sort of like it could be one of the missing WMDs.

My last system was originally an Athlon 1700 which I had later upgraded to a 2400 (2Ghz), so the jump up should be very pleasing when rendering and encoding! I've been an AMD guy for a while, but these days they say for plain old number crunching encoding, the Intel's the way to go unless you go with the very latest CPUS which are over $1k just for the chip. Anyway, I was just popping with excitement and had to vent it out.

Oh, and of course, my long running two favorite sites that help me make all my decisions:
http://www.tomshardware.com
http://www.newegg.com

That sounds like a great setup. I'm in need of an upgrade soon as well, but I'm not sure where I'll be living in the near future so I a may consider a powerful laptop instead.

If I could upgrade now, I would purchase a dual Opeteron setup to replace my dual Athlon MP one.

I like those hardware sites. Others I love include Ars Technica (check out their system guide recommendations), Anandtech, and TechReport.

Oh yeah, how could I forget AnandTech - definitely a great site for info!

Also, I wouldn't mind having one of these...

http://hardware.silicon.com/servers/...9124559,00.htm

Imagine how fast you could render a feature length film...

Wahoo - got it all put togethering and running this weekend. This thing is fast! I rendered out a file I've been rendering a lot lately - a 24p AVI to MPEG-2 - and on my Athlon XP 2400+ (2Ghz) it took about 32 mins, and on this Intel 3.4Ghz Prescott - 13 minutes flat!

And in Vegas, a lot of the transitions that skipped frames before, now just smoothly chug right through. Plus now I feel a lot safer knowing I've finally got a RAID config going. Don't know what took me so long.

I was considering, with the money I had to blow, getting some other filmmaking equipment. But I tell you what, with the time a new editing workstation can save you, it's definitely a better place to throw your money.