50", it will be great if it is full HD. I don't think it is insane. However I think it will pose a small prob if you are playing game with it. The resolution is too low. For video editing I think it is good.

It's a good board, certainly worthy of a look.

50" at 720p is going to be a problem if you sit close to the monitor. You're going to have to be about 5 - 6' away at a minimum. Frankly, I'd feel better about it if it were a 42" monitor at 1080p.

Trying to put together a HD editing PC
 

Looking to purchase a new computer for HD editing, and need opinions on the below specs. Anything I should add or remove or change?


Case: ADK - ADK Tower: 7 3.5" bay, 5 x 5.25 Bays up to 13 HDD's with hot swap bay.

Power Supply: Thermaltake - 550W EPS12V 16DB 8 sata

Motherboard: Daw Core/Penryn P35 chipset DDR2 1066, 3 PCI, 3PCIe. TI Firewire, 6 Sata DD

Processor: Intel - Intel Q6600 Quad Core, Boxed processor, 2.40 GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 8 MB Cache,

Memory: SuperTalent - DDR2-800 1G/128x64 CL4 Memory PC 6400.
Memory 2: SuperTalent - DDR2-800 1G/128x64 CL4 Memory PC 6400.

Hard Drive 1: SEAGATE - Seagate 80G ATA100/7200Rpm 2 meg ST 380215A
Hard Drive 2: SEAGATE - 500G 16Meg Sata II Perpendicular ST3500630AS
Hard Drive 3: SEAGATE - 500G 16Meg Sata II Perpendicular ST3500630AS

Video: XFX - XFX nVidia GeForce 8600GT 256MB 540MHz 2DVI/HDTV PCI-Express Video Card

CD/CD-RW/DVD Panasonic - Panasonic Blu-ray SW-5582

Sound Card Onboard

NIC LinkSys - WIRELESS -G PCI CARD 54

Operating System Microsoft - WINDOWS XP Professional OEM full version w/manual and keycode.

Hello Chris,

That looks pretty good to me... I'll make some specific comments..

ADK Tower - Never heard of it. If you've seen it and you like it, great..

Motherboard: Daw Core? If Daw is a brand, I've never heard of it and would stay away. If it's not a brand and you meant dual, then stick with a good brand such as Gigabyte, ASUS, Intel, etc.

NIC: Just be carefull to set your wireless system with lots of security in mind.

Memory looks fine, though I've never run SuperTalent memory, should be okay.

Hard Drives, I would not use that 80G drive as a system drive. It's an older slower unit. Purchase a new, larger faster hard drive as your system drive. RAID up the two 500G hard drives into a RAID 0 for fastest performance.

Is that panasonic Blu-Ray drive a burner or just a reader?

Video Card is perfect..

Jon

Thanks for the help. The BD drive is a burner.

Made some changes based on your input - let me know if this is better.


Motherboard: Asus - P5W64 WS Professional : Intel Core"2 Extreme / Core"2 Duo Ready Quad-cor

OS/Programs Drive: Western Digital - RAPTOR 740GD SATA 74G 10K

Kept everything else the same.

Also - should I upgrade the sound card?

Which is a better choice, 2 X 500GB or 3 X 320GB when it comes to raid0?

Hope you are not asking me, because I have no idea.

Haha. Anybody has any idea?
I was tinking of either raiding 2 X 500GB or 3 X 320GB. I think the chance of HDD failure is higher with 3 HDD than 2 right? Hmmm...

it is a personal choice. 3 drives stripped together will be faster than 2 but there is a greater chance of failure with 3 drives. in the past year i have had 5 hard drives fail so i ended up running a 1+0 raid. it is more expensive but there are still the benefits of stripping with the advantages of mirroring.

Just curious, why not...
 

I joined a week or two ago, just saw this thread. Happens that in June, after researching what the custom shops were building, I set aside plan to build P5B type system and built instead: Tyan s2696, Antec Titan 550, Xeon 5130 (just one to start) 2x1GB SST 667 FB-DIMM, one 160GB NCQ Barracuda system drive, two (eventually 3) 320GB data drives RAID 0, PNY Quadro FX560, Blackmagic Intensity--a really affordable system, scarcely more money than a Core 2 quad or extreme NLE with gaming GPU. And this system has turned out to be awesome, capturing from my new Canon HV20 with HDMI, w two Acer 22" I got at Best Buy for $190 each (!), and driving a cheaper HDTV with the Intensity for RT monitoring of the timeline in Premiere Pro 2.o
Why don't more people opt for these really affordable 54-bit platforms? have I missed something?
solo

I would say 2 X 500Gb. The performance will be just fine and you'll have less risk in that setup.

5 hard drive failures for personal use in one year is a sign that something is seriously wrong. If you were running several hundred drives, I could see it. You should seriously look into seeing if you are having some power issues at your location. Investment in a good UPS with AVR might help cut down on those failures.

Jon

Chris,

I just built my first system (with a lot of help and input from Jon) and I went with following drive for the operating system and program files:

WD 150GB WD1500ADFD SATA150 16MB 10,000RPM

I've dedicated the system to doing mostly NLE and multimedia work. So far I've edited a project in Studio 11 Ultimate and just recently downloaded Vegas 8 and have been tooling around with that a bit. The new system is really running smoothly, in fact it's just plain awesome. It handles the whole NLE process fantastically thus far. The OS and programs load noticeably quicker than any other systems I've had. Flight Sim (oh ya, multimedia work haha)... runs with no hiccups at high graphics settings. I'm certain that the drive has something to do with this as well.

I wanted to tie into my network wirelessly also (28 windows updates after I loaded the OS!). I added the Belkin F5D8051 Wireless N USB Network Adapter. Even though the reviews I saw were not favorable I went ahead and got it anyway. It installed in a matter of moments with no issues. I'm getting upwards of 275 Mbps with this hookup, plus you can remove it from the cradle and plug it into a usb port directly if you like. The pci cards all have antennas hanging out of them anyway. The Belkin adaptor is not only kind of slick looking and but I think it gets better reception as well.

I went with the 1 TB Hitachi instead of RAID'ing out several drives. There's room for 2 more in the Antec case I put it all in. So, I could get another drive and mirror it if I get nervous about loosing something.

Anyway, there's 2 cents from a newbie! Good luck.

RAID 0, how many drives?
 

Let me share my experience with the question of striping drives for massive, fast video storage.
As i mentioned earlier, I built a dual CPU xeon NLE. For data storage, I first had 2 x 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA drives. These were RAID 0. I happened to test this array along with everything else in the system using the PassMark test suite. later, I added a drive to the array, and tested again, using several different 'strip' sizes. Turns out this does make a difference. and adding a drive (going from 2 to 3) made a big difference too.

So my opinion, based on a few experiments, is a larger number of smaller drives (up to wahtever the limit is on your condroller hardware/RAID management software).

The ESB2 controller, part of the Intel 5000x chipset, will actually add a drive to an existing RAID 0 array, while you are working--you don't even actually have to shut down. and there's a windows storage utility called 'Matrix Storage Manager' that does RAID expansion/conversion (RAID 0 to RAID 5, for example. And this identical RAID implementation is not just on the xeon chipsets. It's also a feature on the following controllers;


• Intel(R) 82801HBM Serial ATA AHCI Controller (ICH8M)
• Intel(R) 82801HEM Serial ATA RAID Controller (ICH8ME)
• Intel(R) 82801HEM Serial ATA AHCI Controller (ICH8ME)
• Intel(R) 82801HR/HH/HO Serial ATA RAID Controller (ICH8R)
• Intel(R) 82801HR/HH/HO Serial ATA AHCI Controller (ICH8R)
• Intel(R) 631xESB/632xESB SATA RAID Controller
• Intel(R) 631xESB/632xESB SATA AHCI Controller
• Intel(R) 82801GHM Serial ATA RAID Controller (ICH7MDH)
• Intel(R) 82801GBM Serial ATA AHCI Controller (ICH7M)
• Intel(R) 82801GR Serial ATA RAID Controller (ICH7R)
• Intel(R) 82801GR Serial ATA AHCI Controller (ICH7R)
• Intel(R) 82801GH Serial ATA RAID Controller (ICH7DH)
• Intel(R) 82801GH Serial ATA AHCI Controller (ICH7DH)
• Intel(R) 82801FR Serial ATA RAID Controller (ICH6R)
• Intel(R) 82801FR Serial ATA AHCI Controller (ICH6R)
• Intel(R) 82801FBM Serial ATA AHCI Controller (ICH6M)

The Intel Matrix Storage Manager consists of the following components:

• Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver
• Intel(R) Matrix Storage Console
• Event Monitor
• Intel Matrix Storage Manager option ROM

anyone who is planning to use the hardware RAID support of current Intel chipset should read the Intel Matrix documentation, which can be found on the intel website.
solo