I've been searching the archives and found lots of different opinions, but at the rate technology changes who knows if there is better options available now.

I will be building a new computer for myself in the next 1-2 months. I'm currently on a P4-1.4ghz which I'm giving to a family member. The only parts I've been considering taking is the matrox millenium G550 in it, and the SBAudigy (Firewire port). I don't know if its worth it though will the advances in both of these pieces of hardware since I bought them.

In terms of budget, lets say $2000 CAN. Most (if not all) parts will probably be bought from http://www.canadacomputers.com . Not necessary to use the full budget obviously.

I'm looking for sugesstions on basically everything - AMD/Intel, Motherboards, hard drive brands, DVD writer. Anyone have suggestions or maybe some links with more info?

Thanks
Ari

What NLE will yopu be using?

That's something else I have to decide on. I "grew up" on Premier 4-6.5, but haven't made the jump to Pro. Am thinking of going the Avid Express route instead.

In other news, I think I found the DVD writer for the new machine, the Plextor PX-708A .

Ari,

I would highly recomend a P4 machine with a hyper-threading processor. Most new software takes advantage of HT, or will in future versions. Long story short, an HT processor can execute 2 threads at the same time, the net result is approx 2x speed increase. I'm pretty sure any Intel P4 processor with an 800mhz front side bus has HT. I use a 2.6 w/ HT. This will shorten render times, and make real-time previews much faster.

I use the Abit IS7 motherboard which seems very stable. I've built several machines and Abit boards have always seemed rock solid.

For drives - get at least a 7200rpm drive with an 8mb onboard cache. I use these exclusively and have never had problems with throughput latency. The new Serial-ATA drives are usually only a couple dollars more and give some speed increase over standard IDE drives, but stick to the above and things will run smooth. I use Western Digital JB serries drives - have had experience w/ over 15 of them (I used to build servers for other people) and never had any problems.

For RAM - Unless you're using After Effects a lot, 512 MB is fine. Stick with the 400mhz speed (I think its' also called PC3200).

For a burner, just make sure it does DVD-/+R and DVD-/+RW. Use only DVD-R ("dash" or "minus" R) if it's going to play in a set top DVD player. For re-writable, stick to DVD+RW (Plus RW).

That should cover it. I built my machine including DVD burner and about 300GB total drive space, from scratch, and spent just a few pennies over $1000 US. Before you order, you might check Directron. (www.directron.com). They are US and don't know if they ship to Can - but outstanding pricess and top level support. Have ordered from them many many times and never regretted it.

As for software - I got the Adobe Video Bundle Pro - it's currently $1500. That's a stack a' bills for software, but with all the pieces you get, plus all the quality plugings for free, I figure there's about $6000 worth of software in the box. It will comlpletely outfit all your creative needs for a long time.

Hope that helps. Fee free to contact direct about any more specifics. I've learned by my own failures and could probably point you in the right direction.

Hope that helps.
www.imageweddingfilms.com

How important do you guys feel buying "Brand Name" RAM (eg Kingston) is?

On RAM, I would actually get 1GB.

Brand names now really are OCR, Mushkin, Crucial, and Corsair. Kingston is still good though and sometimes has deals on their website (which I don't know if they have a CAN site deal). I prefer Mushkin and OCR.

If you have not built a system before, you may want to stick to using ATA/IDE drives. They do not require a special driver installation step during the installation of Windows XP. Get 2 drives too. I would look at a 80-120GB drive for the applications and OS, and a 160-250GB drive as your video capture and render drive.

A video card such as one based off of the ATI Radeon 9600 XT chipset can now be found for $150, but you may not need that much horsepower. I use Pinnacle Liquid Edition, which utilizes the Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) for some renders, so a fast card makes a difference. You may be able to use a 9500 or 9200 card, but try to stay way from the SE versions as they do have some performance compromises.

And, this is one of the better guides to building your own.

http://www.omnicast.net/~tmcfadden/guides/build/index.html

I've built numerous machines, just none in the last two years, so i've somewhat lost touch with current advancements.

I didn't know the processors of consumer-level cards could be used to speed of rendering. Do any other cards aside from ATI have features similar to that?

Actually, it is the software in the NLE that uses the card. Pinnacle is using the Direct3D APIs in Windows to use the card to render some effects. Make sense if you think about it as that is what games do. It will also work with nVidia cards and other video cards that meet Pinnacle's minimum requirements.

AvidXpressPro also utilizes the faster cards for 3d openGL applications. Gives you real time previews... pretty nice.

That's pretty cool; so in that case, maybe I should replace my G550 with a more powerful card?

The reason I bought the G550 way back when is it has two monitor out ports on it, but that is not so much as a necessity for me now.

Hey Ari,

I use a P4 2.8GHz with HT and 1GB of ram with After Effects and Premiere. It does the job fine. I agree with George, get 1GB, it makes a difference. And stick with brand names, especially when dealing with HT. Less likely you will run into any issues. Crucial has never let me down. Right now i am using OCR which also seems good. If you go with the P4 with HT you will need PC3200.

I can also vouche for the Abit IS7. Stable and cheap. Hard drive space is cheap, so you don't have to skimp on that.

Here are some sites i go to when i am building a system. Focused on gaming, but should give you a some idea of what to get. I usually start with the budget system and work up to what i need. $2000 should get you pretty far for a budget machine.

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/guides/index.php
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/index.html
http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/index.html

Do people have links to sites specifically for NLE or After Effects systems, especially in the budget range?

hey, i started a thread a few weeks back on this topic as well. the thread is entitled "Best processor for video editing and 3d graphics" or something like that.

check it out, I know pentiums are best for video editing, but i needed a comptuer to do 3D modeling (Softimage), so i ended up getting dual Opterons.


i think you will find a lot of useufl info in that post

best regards

<<<-- Originally posted by Kevin King : Long story short, an HT processor can execute 2 threads at the same time, the net result is approx 2x speed increase. -->>>

Benchmarks show no where near 2x the speed. More like a 10-15% increase.

Eric, by OCR you mean OCZ?

As far as brand name RAM goes, the best IMO are Corsair, Crucial and maybe. These brands are generally regarded as the least likely to be dead on arrival. The next step down is Kingston, OCZ.

The main quality differences in RAM is:
A- Does it run without errors?
B- What are the memory timings? (lower is better)

A: Brand name RAM is less likely to have errors. RAM is sometimes dead on arrival and in rare cases will fail.

B: The performance difference from memory timings is so small that IMO you should not need to pay much attention to this. With just any RAM you can lower the memory timings to get better performance. Most RAM will hit some good timings. There is some quite expensive RAM that will get *slightly* better timings which translates to around 1% difference on performance (depends *highly* on what you do and what timings you are looking at). It may be worth it to pay a few extra dollars to get brand name RAM instead of cheap crap so it is more reliable and has slightly better performance than what's cheapest.

Lowering memory timings: You do this in the BIOS. I cannot recall the timings off the top of my head (there are four of them, one of which is CAS latency).

You can download memtest86 to help test your memory while tweaking.

With Vegas rendering, lower timings makes no difference at all in rendering speeds. I have not tried this iwth MPEG2 encoding, which I suspect would benefit from lower timings.

2- Abit IS7: I got to play with this motherboard today. It's a nice motherboard with great bang for your buck. For overclocking I like the Asus P4P800 slightly better since the Asus board doesn't need to move a jumper around when your computer no longer boots. It is a nice board for tweaking though.

Thanks, Yes! OCZ. Sorry about that.

I used to consider OCZ an off brand, but lately they have been getting a lot of good press and growing pretty fast.

They are a very popular brand with hobbyists, especially the speed freaks and overclockers.

In the past couple of months, I had to build a couple of machines for NLE's and compositing. I ended up using OCZ brand 1024x2 times 2 sets to get 4gb ram.

Performance appears to be just a touch better than the Corsair, but that can vary by system and manufacturer.

So far, we have been very pleased with the systems and they bench out well.

OCZ RAM is expensive! It costs significantly more than more resonable RAM such as Kingston HyperX, normal Kingston (CAS3), Crucial, or the cheapest stuff you can find.

PC4xxx RAM does not help performance unless you actually run RAM at that speed, which implies overclocking (which is ok IMO but may not be ok for clients).

As far as performance goes, I got to build a computer a few days ago and the Kingston RAM I used (2X512MB DDR400/OC3200 sticks rated for 3-3-3-8) is running at 2-3-2-5. Compare this to the best timings possible, which are 2-2-2-5 (for Intel P4). Only a few brands of RAM will hit 2-2-2-5 (Mushkin level II, OCZ PC3500 Platinum limited edition to name two). Most of the OCZ stuff will hit worse timings than 2-3-2-5, especially anything in the PC4000 and higher range.

OCZ I do not consider to be a good brand because from what I hear they have bad technical support. However they are probably good RAM that is less likely to be DOA.

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan : OCZ RAM is expensive! It costs significantly more than more resonable RAM such as Kingston HyperX, normal Kingston (CAS3), Crucial, or the cheapest stuff you can find.-->>>

I bought just your typical PC3200 registered memory and it is no more expensive than any other name brand like Corsair, Crucial, Mushkin or others. They all fall around 320.00-340.00 for a 1gb stick depending on dealer.

You mention "cheapest stuff you can buy", and I never recommend going with the cheapest money can buy.

90% of the system problems I see are people who skimped on junk ram and went for cheap over quality.


<<<--OCZ I do not consider to be a good brand because from what I hear they have bad technical support. However they are probably good RAM that is less likely to be DOA. -->>>

OCZ is getting excellent reviews from the various hardware sites on the web, which is the only reason I tried it. One site I read not too long ago did a shootout between OCZ, Corsair, Crucial and a couple of others, I think Kingston was one of them also, and OCZ really outperformed all of the other brands in the benchmarks.

If bad tech support was the only criteria to determining the quality of a product, Asus wouldn't have any customers. They have the absolute worst support I have ever seen.

However they do make a great product, as long as you never have to rely on their support.

The same can be said of a lot of companies.

There actually may not be a problem with buying the cheapest RAM around. As long as you test it with memtest86, you can get a stick of RAM that works and is very close in performance to everything else out there.

I have a stick of PMI RAM (my dad bought it in Hong Kong because it's cheaper there) that hits timings of 2-3-2-5 in single channel.

RAM is rarely dead on arrival so getting the cheapest RAM can be ok. (waiting for a good stick to come back, shipping costs, hours spent with tech support, hours spent troubleshooting the problem)

Very often people will get some fancy overclocking RAM (anything higher than PC3200) and find that it is incompatible with their motherboard.

90% of the system problems I see are people who skimped on junk ram and went for cheap over quality.

That's news to me. Most people problem's are software-related (spyware, adware, and viruses being leading causes). As far as hardware problems go, bad power supplies seem to me to be the leading cause of problems.


OCZ is getting excellent reviews from the various hardware sites on the web, which is the only reason I tried it. One site I read not too long ago did a shootout between OCZ, Corsair, Crucial and a couple of others, I think Kingston was one of them also, and OCZ really outperformed all of the other brands in the benchmarks.
"fastest" can mean different things, What tests did they do?

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan : There actually may not be a problem with buying the cheapest RAM around. As long as you test it with memtest86, you can get a stick of RAM that works and is very close in performance to everything else out there. -->>>


You might want to spend some time in hardware forums where people are building systems. System issues related to cheap ram is VERY common.


<<<-- Very often people will get some fancy overclocking RAM (anything higher than PC3200) and find that it is incompatible with their motherboard. -->>>

You seem rather fixated on overclockers ram purchases. Not sure why you keep bringing it up as it doesn't apply to what I am even talking about.

I'm not even talking about overclocking. I'm talking about your basic PC3200 memory.

<<<-- That's news to me. Most people problem's are software-related (spyware, adware, and viruses being leading causes). As far as hardware problems go, bad power supplies seem to me to be the leading cause of problems.

"fastest" can mean different things, What tests did they do? -->>>

Fortuantely I do not deal with end users with little understanding of computers. I deal with people who build their own, and the problems they run into on the forums I deal with.

Most of those people are relatively software saavy and understand things like that.

News to you or not, it's a fact that I see more than a few issues or help questions that end up with people who went cheap on the ram, or cheap on the power supply.

Having built network and computer gear for around 15 years now, I have seen enough to know that buying cheap ram for a performance oriented system like an animation station, NLE or compositing box is a very bad idea.

I'll have to go back and locate the ram article. I generally don't catalog that stuff or save all the links as I read far too much stuff for that to be a reasonable endeavor.

On the forum I sometimes read (arstechnica.com) bad RAM comes up around as often as DOA motherboard, screws shorting the motherboard, heatsink incorrectly installed, and insufficient power supply.

Perhaps my memory is selective (no pun intended).

a bad chip perhaps?

I second Glenn's findings. Memory is not the first issue.

I do know that RAM issues tend to be in the overclocking arena. That is where the new OCZ is shining. Since BH5 and BH6 chips are no longer made (long day in the sun, cannot remember who it was who decided to quit making memory), there has been a gap. I know that the extreme Xeon over-clocks are working on the latest OCZ.

As for the number from MS. Video drivers are the number 1 issue for crashes. Memory pool corruption was about 17% and of that, it was 10-25% of that that was memory (it is hard to figure out, which is why MS has released their mem tester available at the Online Crash Analysis site http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

BTW Glenn, I have Muskin Level II PC2700 in my box :D

Winbond stopped making the BH5 chips. Don't know about BH6. They were the only chips which could do 2-2-2-5 timings (most chips get stuck at 2-3-2-5). There might be some new stuff now that can hit 2-2-2-5 (OCZ?) as well as chips which are already using stockpiled BH5 (Mushkin and Kingston?).

Keep in mind the slightly faster memory timings make very, very little difference. Usually it would be less than 1 percent, and for some video rendering neglible (going from 3-4-4-8 to 2-3-2-5 with PAT enabled on Vegas makes no measurable difference). MPEG2 encoding is probably different, but that 1 timing makes little difference. Although for the performance slut inside all of us, it is worth paying money for! :) :) :)

<<<-- Originally posted by Ari Shomair :

In terms of budget, lets say $2000 CAN. Most (if not all) parts will probably be bought from http://www.canadacomputers.com . Not necessary to use the full budget obviously.

-->>>

I just live a couple of blocks from their downtown location and like you I want a machine for editing...I want to edit montages with stuff from http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php.. using Premiere and After Effects.

However, I might go with an AMD system as i have about half your budget.

I don't know much about hardware...can anyone look over this list and tell me what they'd do with $1-1.5K ?

http://canadacomputers.com/systems.html

I live in Toronto and like Filtech Computers better than Canada Computers because the staff at CC (at least the owner Charles) is friendly and helpful. http://www.torontopcstores.com/
Prices between Filtech and Canada Computers are close.

Here's what I'd try to get:

the biggest hard drive you can afford- buffer not that important, flip a coin if you like.

CPU: A Pentium 4 makes the most sense and should fit in your budget. Get the "C" or Canterwood version (800FSB, hyperthreading) and not the A, B, or E (Prescott) versions.

Motherboard: Abit IS7 is not a bad board. It has firewire and you can tweak it to enable PAT.

DVD burner?

Case: Antec 3700AMB- good case and comes with power supply.

(optional): Artic Silver 5 thermal paste to lower CPU temps. You only need this if overclocking. $10 at Filtech when I bought it there.

RAM: 1GB is ideal, 512MB might be fine. I am not too familiar with Premiere but from what I hear it is a RAM hog. I'd get the cheapest PC3200 stuff you can find.

Video card: If you have the budget for dual monitors then go for it! Otherwise, look for a motherboard with on-board video and an AGP slot for future expansion.

Monitor: Get a flat mid-high end 17" CRT. i.e. NEC FE791SB. Other recommendations are (19") Samsung 955DF, 900NF, NEC P95f+
Recommendations are from http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/budget.html (scroll down)

Floppy: Nice to have. If you have another computer and a USB key then you can copy stuff onto the USB key and may be able to get away without having a floppy.

Mouse and keyboard: Whatever you like the best really. The Microsoft Keyboard and Mouse (OEM) aren't that bad.

Speakers: Don't mix on consumer speakers (they aren't accurate). If sound is important then you'd want to invest in decent monitor speakers and sound treatment ($600???). Otherwise you can try to get away with mixing on headphones and checking on a lot of different speakers.

Sound card: Don't get the Creative stuff unless you are gaming. Get a something like an M-audio Revolution or 2496 if you have decent monitor speakers. Otherwise you can live with on-board sound.

I don't know the prices of everything above.

I'm going to check out Filtech. I didn't know about them, though now I am guessing it is the store next door to the 7-11 that I pass many times but never go into.


Thanks, for the tips on what to get, and as you seem to be very knowledgeable, I am going to trust you and probably buy exactly what you've recommended (only mobo+cpu+ram as I already have a DVD burner and the dual monitor set up).

I don't really need much after-purchase service, hence the CanadaComputers.com . I've never had any problems there, but from the looks of http://www.torontopcstores.com/index.php?board=16;action=display;threadid=19 many other people have.

I guess When you really get down to it with these OEM vendors though its only a $5 or $10 differences in the end.

Roger, have fun building your computer! As far as my recommendations go, I didn't really explain them and I kept your budget in mind (so they may not be applicable to other people).

2- Bring cash or else you pay extra.