Need sage advice in getting right CS5 PC

[Ray Bell]

There's some good info in this article too....

Videoguys Blog - Videoguys' System Recommendations for Video Editing

[Bruce Pelley]

Gents:

Here’s the latest on this odyssey. Sorry for the lapse in coverage. Was in wait & hold mode.

As a first stepping stone which is subject to changes, I purchased a

HP Pavilion Elite HPE-510t PC which is scheduled to arrive on Thursday.

Here are the relevant specs:

• OS Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 quad-core processor with Turbo-Boost [up to 3.8GHz, 8MB cache]/ Intel 2nd Gen Core = Sandy bridge?
• 6GB DDR3-1333MHz SDRAM [3 DIMMs]
• 1TB RAID 0 (2 x 500GB SATA HDDs)
• 1.5GB DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GT 440 [DVI, HDMI, VGA]
• LightScribe 16X max. DVD+/-R/RW SuperMulti drive
• Blu-ray player & Lightscribe SuperMulti DVD burner (dual drives - Blu-Ray & DVD burner)

Total slots:1 PCIe (x16 graphics), 3 PCIe (x1), 2 MiniCard

Also important to note is that I will have Premiere Pro CS5.5 in the next couple of weeks which certifies more cards.

· The motherboard is unknown to me: Pegatron
· HP/Compaq name: Cleveland-GL8
· Intel H67 chipsetTDP: 95W
· Socket type: LGA 1155
· Motherboard supports the following processor upgrades:
o Core i3-2xxx series
o Core i5-2xxx series
o Core i7-26xx series
· Four 240-pin DDR3 DIMM sockets
· Supports PC3 10600 (1333 MHz) DDR3 DIMMs
· Non-ECC memory only, unbuffered
· Maximum HP/Compaq approved memory is 16 GB
· Supports PCI Express x16 graphics cards
· DVI-I output port
· HDMI output port

Yes, I definitely need a couple of firewire ports.


So here are my questions:

1) The power supply is only 300 watts so it needs upgrading. If I run CS5 or 5.5 only in “software only” mode and not accelerated, will my power hold out and not get too hot??

2) Could I somehow get the Raid 0 configuration changed so I have 2 independent internal hd’s? I do not know if that’s it for hard drive space.

3) Does the motherboard support tri or quad channel ram? Is “channeled” ram advantageous over plain old unbuffered ram? Can this system perhaps also handle 1600 and opposed to 1333 ram?

4) What’s the best bang for the buck when I upgrade to 12 gigs of ram or more?

5) What considerations do I need to think about going forward?

6) Will the 1.5 gig GTX 440 be acceptable for a starting card?


It least it arrives tested, warrantied, upgradeable and somewhat open to making it a closer fit.

Thanks for all of the input offered to date.

Very educational and thought provoking.

What would you do going forward if you were standing in my shoes?

[Jay West]

"1) The power supply is only 300 watts so it needs upgrading. If I run CS5 or 5.5 only in “software only” mode and not accelerated, will my power hold out and not get too hot??"

No and you've mixed up concepts here.

With a GTX 440 card installed by HP, it will run. Hardware MPE is not overclocking. You simply use the more efficient processing power of the GTX's multiple GPUs rather than than loading up the system CPU. Probably, running software MPE will produce more worisome heat because it loads your CPU. Anyway, you absolutely want hardware MPE.

Also, the small power supply does not cause the computer to overheat. It is more like plugging too many things into a wall outlet. The overload trips the breaker or fuse. Your system shuts down. As long as you do not add more components that connect to the power supply, it should run.

2) Could I somehow get the Raid 0 configuration changed so I have 2 independent internal hd’s? I do not know if that’s it for hard drive space.

Boxes that ship with only a 300 watt power supply often do not have room for more hard drives. If there is room, the small, 300 watt power supply probably is not enough to add more internal hard drives. I'd guess the manual probably says nothing and that you will have to call or contact HP support to find out. Also, find out from HP if their Pergatron motherboard uses standard or proprietary power connections. (Dell is infamous for doing special connectors that can complicate the task of upgrading or replacing a power supply.)

You may be able to reformat the drives into two separate drives but you might not want to. For one thing, HP may have done this raid with 5400 rpm disks. For another, your HP's system restore disks might not work if you get a system crash and need to re-install. Also, make sure you have (or have made) a Win 7 installation disk before you start. You want an actual Win 7 install disk, not a system restore disk. Call or contact HP support and get explicit instructions before you mess with the set-up they have given you.

At this point, I suspect that your best bet is leave the hard drive configuration alone and see if you can add some large capacity 7200 rpm external drives which have their own power supplies. Firewire and e-SATA, would be the best choices (maybe one of each). If your HP has a USB 3.0 port, then a USB 3 drive could work as well. Best to get two large capacity drives, one for edit files and one for renders and DVD files. With you using a single XHA1 shooting HDV, this will probably be sufficient for editing under CS5.

3) Does the motherboard support tri or quad channel ram? Is “channeled” ram advantageous over plain old unbuffered ram? Can this system perhaps also handle 1600 and opposed to 1333 ram?

If it comes with DDR3 RAM -- DDR 3 means it is triple channel --- then that is what it supports. Older-style RAM modules won't work. As for whether it supports DDR3/1600, you'll have to find from HP or maybe there is a Pergatron website that will tell you.

4) What’s the best bang for the buck when I upgrade to 12 gigs of ram or more?

Don't know what you mean. Are you asking about cheap RAM?


5) What considerations do I need to think about going forward?

See above. The XHA1 can be touchy about firewire ports. Some of those on major manufacturer's machines have been junk. If youu can't get the new computer to let you capture from your XHA1, do a search here on "firewire legacy" and try the recommended device driver settings. If that does not work, be prepared to buy a Firewire card.

Otherwise, the question is too broad to know how to answer now that you have purchased a system.


6) Will the 1.5 gig GTX 440 be acceptable for a starting card?

Yes.

[Spiros Zaharakis]

DDR3 doesn't mean it's triple channel.

1366 socket X58 based motherboards support triple channel, 1155 socket H/P67 motherboards support dual channel memory. Three memory modules on that PC is less than optimal configuration but that's something both HP and Dell do regularly and I can't really figure out why.
Either 2X4GB sticks or 4X4GB sticks would be my choice.
Using only two memory slots makes motherboard life easier.

Honestly though I believe that off the shelf low budget HPs Dells and the likes are too limiting for video editing. If possible find a good shop that will build a Video oriented PC for you.

I just saw you have already bought that PC so nevermind.

[Jay West]

"DDR3 doesn't mean it's triple channel."

I think what you mean is that putting DDR3 memory modules into a motherboard will not give triple channel memory functions unless that motherboard actually supports triple channel memory. DDR3 actually is "triple channel memory" but the modules will function as DDR2 when used in, say, many of the current crop of Sandybridge mobos that only support DDR2.

As for why HP and Dell persist in using three memory module sets, I am as puzzled by this Spiros is. Maybe it is just to support some marketing hype?

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Jay West

"DDR3 doesn't mean it's triple channel."

I think what you mean is that putting DDR3 memory modules into a motherboard will not give triple channel memory functions unless that motherboard actually supports triple channel memory. DDR3 actually is "triple channel memory" but the modules will function as DDR2 when used in, say, many of the current crop of Sandybridge mobos that only support DDR2.

As for why HP and Dell persist in using three memory module sets, I am as puzzled by this Spiros is. Maybe it is just to support some marketing hype?

Actually, you are using the wrong acronym here. DDR2 is actually an older memory technology that's been first introduced with the Socket LGA 775 platform (the infamous Pentium 4 5xx series CPUs), and was last used on Intel platforms with the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad. DDR2 will not even physically or electrically fit current Intel i-series platforms because DDR2 and DDR3 memory are both physically and electrically incompatible with one another. And because DDR2 memory is no longer widely used in new systems, the price per GB of DDR2 memory is now much higher than DDR3 memory. DDR2 memory also requires a significantly higher voltage to operate than DDR3 memory does: DDR2 needs 1.8V to 2.1V while DDR3 operates typically at 1.5V to 1.65V. The use of DDR2 memory will permanently burn out the IMCs of Sandy Bridge and other Intel IMCs because their typical operating voltage is much higher than the maximum that's allowed by Intel in these CPUs.

[Jay West]

So, channels are a feature of the motherboards but not the RAM modules themselves?

That makes sense of how we get triple channel memory with I7-9xxx/LGA1366/X58 mobos using DDR3 RAM modules but only dual channel when the same RAM modules are used with mobos for AMD Socket AM3 processors and Intel I3, i5 and i7-8xx processors.

I stand corrected.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Jay West

So, channels are a feature of the motherboards but not the RAM modules themselves?

Or in the case of the Intel i-series CPUs and the AMD CPUs, channels are a feature of the on-CPU-die memory controllers themselves. The type of memory supported (DDR2, DDR3) is dictated by the memory controller. The AMD AM3 CPUs support either type of RAM, depending on the motherboard that the CPU is used on. By contrast, the on-die memory controllers on Intel CPUs is DDR3 only.

[Spiros Zaharakis]

Originally Posted by Jay West

As for why HP and Dell persist in using three memory module sets, I am as puzzled by this Spiros is. Maybe it is just to support some marketing hype?

My take on this is that both companies, bought large quantities of triple channel memory when 1366 socket came out but the move to the cheaper and more popular 1156 and 1155 sockets left them with large supplies of tripple channel memory they couldn't sell otherwise.

[Justin Molush]

Well, a good amount has been covered in this thread already, but Ill throw my 2 cents in the ring... Here's my attempt at spending your budget of 1,000-1,200 without monitor, keyboard, and mouse of course...

i7 950 Bloomfield (3.06 quad)
ASUS Rampage III (I'm an asus fan, MSI works well too imo)
8GB (2x4GB) Corsair XMS
300GB WD Velociraptor
2TB WD Green
PNY Quadro FX580

Thats 1100 dollars right there, giving you some slack. If you need budget room, kill the WD 300GB - Im just a huge fan of having fast scratch space.

[Harm Millaard]

Why screw up your memory and disk setup? On a 950 you need three sticks of memory, not two and why cripple the system with a green disk?

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Justin Molush

Well, a good amount has been covered in this thread already, but Ill throw my 2 cents in the ring... Here's my attempt at spending your budget of 1,000-1,200 without monitor, keyboard, and mouse of course...

i7 950 Bloomfield (3.06 quad)
ASUS Rampage III (I'm an asus fan, MSI works well too imo)
8GB (2x4GB) Corsair XMS
300GB WD Velociraptor
2TB WD Green
PNY Quadro FX580

Thats 1100 dollars right there, giving you some slack. If you need budget room, kill the WD 300GB - Im just a huge fan of having fast scratch space.

Not a good configuration to begin with. In fact, CS5 works best with more than 12GB of RAM - and there is a significant improvement in performance, especially in SD MPEG-2 DVD encodes, with 14GB of RAM compared to 12GB of RAM. 8GB just does not cut it on an LGA 1366 platform, especially if the IMC is constrained to dual-channel operation by the number of installed modules. And LGA 1366 platforms just do not perform as well in dual-channel mode as LGA 1155 or 1156 platforms (meaning that full triple-channel mode is required for optimum performance in CS5.x with LGA 1366 platforms) And as I demonstrated a while ago, in the PPBM5 benchmarks an LGA 1366 system with only 6GB of RAM in triple-channel actually performed equal to or faster than the same system with 8GB of RAM in dual-channel-only mode.

And the WD Green drive is slow, even for a "green" drive: Its maximum sequential transfer speed is slower than nearly all of the current-generation desktop hard drives. Its 110 MB/s maximum pales in comparison to the 130+ MB/s achieved by most of the other current hard drives. And that's not to mention that the "green" drives constantly spin themselves down when idle, and take far too long to spin back up to speed. (And the spin-down does occur occasionally even if you're running CPU- and disk-intensive apps.) More importantly, the "green" drives spin at less than 6,000 RPM, with random access speed predictably slower than 7,200 RPM hard drives (as a group).

Third, the FX 580 is a very poor choice for CS5.x: Hardware-wise, it is the equivalent of only a GeForce 9500 GT (which Bill Gehrke has demonstrated is much, much slower than even an ATi GPU, let alone newer Nvidia GPUs, especially in MPEG-2 DVD and H.264 Blu-ray encodes: On a stock-speed i7-980X hexa-core, PPBM5 took more than 150 seconds in MPEG-2 and more than 190 seconds in H.264 with the 9500 GT or FX 580 but 33 seconds or less in MPEG-2 and 82 seconds or less in H.264 with even an ATi card, let alone a newer, faster GeForce). Worse, the FX 580 is only offered with 512MB of RAM, which is nowhere near enough to even enable MPE GPU mode (the MPE GPU mode requires a minimum of 765MB of free, unused graphics RAM just to even work at all). Put the two together, and the FX 580 / 9500 GT is a performance mule in a herd of thoroughbreds, capable of bringing down the overall performance of a heavily overclocked dual hexa-core Xeon X56xx system with 48GB of RAM to the level of only a stock-speed single i7-9xx system with only 6GB of RAM.

Had you run the PPBM5 benchmark on that system, you'll find that its overall performance score would have fallen almost to the very bottom of the PPBM5 results list (with an overall total time of well over 1,000 seconds, compared to less than 200 seconds with a properly tuned fast system) with a configuration like that. As a result, that build would have been a complete waste of money, with a very low BFTB score because most if not all of the components cost way too much money for such bottom-of-the-line performance.

[Dick Mays]

Randall,

You have an incredible understanding of what it takes to make CS5 fly.

So for between $1,000 and $1500, what MOBO, processor, disk and memory configuration do you recommend?

[Randall Leong]

Dick,

Currently, I have two sets of recommendations for the core components in the $1,000 to $1,500 range:

1) LGA 1366/X58 Build

• i7-960 CPU
• X58 motherboard from Asus, Gigabyte, eVGA or MSI in the $225 to $300 range
• 12GB (3x4GB) DDR3-1333 or faster-rated RAM
• Samsung F4 320GB HD322GJ hard drive
• 4 x Samsung F3 1TB HD103SJ hard drives
• GeForce GTX 560 Ti or GTX 570

or:

2) LGA 1155/P67 or Z68 Build

• i7-2600K
• P67 or Z68 motherboard in the $150 to $250 price range
• At least 8GB (2x4GB) of DDR3-1333 RAM, preferably 16GB (4x4GB)
• Samsung F4 320GB HD322GJ hard drive
• 4 x Samsung F3 1TB HD103SJ hard drives
• GeForce GTX 560 Ti or GTX 570

In either build, go with at least an 800W (or higher-wattage) quality PSU manufactured by Enhance, Seasonic, Impervio (or maybe one of a few other actual manufacturers such as CWT or Delta, whose lines tend to be less consistent between models). These PSUs are sold under various brand names such as Cooler Master, Corsair, Antec, XFX, etc. (The Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold series PSUs that Harm has been recommending are manufactured by Enhance - and the 800W model from that line is priced significantly lower than most other 800~850W PSUs that perform slightly better.) You also need to factor in the cost of a case (a large-size case is strongly recommended here), an optical disc burner and a high-performance CPU air cooler. (And these parts are just to complete the system tower itself; the monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers are peripherals whose choice is largely personal preference.)

[Bruce Pelley]

Update from the original poster!

Along the course of time I added a firewire card ( just recently) additional ram and a large drive dedicated exclusively for video.

My next and hopefully last upgrade is a suitable power supply.

I have someone who has offered to put one in although it will void my warranty. Is that a reasonable risk?

I want to take full advantage of CUDA however not on my current/factory 350 watt supply is wholly inadequate.

Please offer some recommendations to help me end this adventure.

What should I be looking for?

Thank you.