Jim,

I think the Enermax will be just fine with 3 HD's and the rest of your setup...

Power supply
 

Hey Jon,
I went with this for the power supply:
ENERMAX EG565P-VE FMA II ATX 12V VERSION 2.2 535W SLI CROSSFIRE READY RoHS UL FCC POWER SUPPLY FOR ATX CASES
just to get the extra wattage should I decide to add more drives or go Quad core.

Have you heard of whether this PS fit into the P182?

Thanks
Jim

Perfect... It'll fit just fine...

Jon

Jon,
Thanks for starting this thread and for all of your help.
I'll update this thread on how I made out - can't wait to get it built.

Jim

DDR3 Memory
 

Is there any real benefit to going with DDR3 vs DDR2? It appears at first glance that it would offer more FSB which I understand is important for video editing. But are there any issues with stability? What are the pros and cons?

I'm looking to build a new system and I want it to last me a while without breaking the bank. Budget is around $2000 to 2500 for the CPU

The benefit is marginal, 2-3% performance gain, but a huge loss on your wallet. Consider that the new Seaburg chipset used for the Harpertown (5400) Xeon's still relies on DDR2-800 ECC FBDIMM's and use a 1600 MHz FSB.

Setting up new system
 

I received my system yesterday and installed all of the components - starts up without a hitch.
However, I have a 250G SATA drive that I want to use for my system drive. When I go to partition it Windows only sees 137GB.

Is there a way to get around this?

Jim

Don't partition any drives. Your performance will only suffer.

137 GB limit
 

Well, I don't really want to partition the drives. I want to use the whole drive as the system drive but I am assuming the BIOS only sees 137GB. I read something about 24 and 48 bit LBA and if the BIOS doesn't have that you need to upgrade. I'm just surprised that the gigabyte motherboard would have this limitation.

Jim

That would be highly unlikely with a figure of 137. Right click My Computer, select Manage, then select Disk Management and check the properties of your C: drive. If you can't solve it there, a reformat may be necessary. You have the option when installing Windows to use the whole disk and you can check the recognized size of the disk. If that does not work, check your Bios settings.

No OS yet
 

Well, I haven't installed the OS yet - I'm trying to get the BIOS to see the entire 250GB. I'll have to call GigaByte tomorrow.

Need XP SP2
 

I got the drive to install the full 250GB after using an XP install disk with SP2.
Once the drivers were installed the system is up and screaming fast!

Thanks again Jon for this thread.

Jim

HDV System
 

First of all, hello everybody. This forum has given me a bunch of great info already on building my system, but I thought I'd just put it up here and see if anyone sees any potential bugaboos.

This system is for editing a 1 hour documentary shot in HDV (About 50 hours of mixed DV/HDV material, hoping to use the Blackmagic Intensity Pro's Online JPEG intermediate codec for editing). I'm considering doing a RAID 5 array to keep performance brisk and spread the risk around a little.

-Antec P180B case
-Seasonic S12 Energy Plus SS-650HT 650W PSU
-ASUS P5K Deluxe Mainboard
-Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor
-2 x OCZ Platinum DD2 1066 (PC2 8500) 2x1G SDRAM (4GB total)
-Western Digital Raptor 150GB Hard Drive (System)
-(3) Western Digital Caviar GP 1TB Hard Drives in RAID-5
-Samsung 226BW 22" LCD Monitor
-Plextor PX-810SA/SW-BL DVD Burner (SATA)
-Windows XP Pro SP2 OEM
-2 x Fantom G-Force MegaDisk MDC1000 1TB 7200 RPM External Hard Drives (For backup only)
-Blackmagic Intensity Pro Card
-M-Audio Delta 1010LT Sound Card

+ Mackie HR824mk2 speakers, cables, Adobe Studio Premium Upgrade, Magic Bullet Looks

I realize accurate detail monitoring via the LCD monitor will still be a challenge, but for color correction, I already have a Sony PVM-14L5 video monitor, which can do component BNC 1080i input.

The Caviar GP drives are in an effort to keep noise and energy usage down, but if anyone has had a bad experience with using them for HD editing, I'd like to know. Also, has anyone worked with the Delta 1010LT? It seems right for the price, but it would be nice to have a second opinion.

i dont trust the wester digital.

recently bought a 500gb LaCie and great so far.

1- If value is something you're looking for, then the Antec case+PSU bundles might be worth considering.

2- If you need low noise, there's lots of info over at silentpcreview.com

3- I don't think you'll see that much of a performance improvement from going with a very fast system drive... video editing is mostly limited to drive bandwidth, not seek times. Maybe your programs will load a few seconds faster but... you'll likely save more time by just having a bigger 7200rpm hard drive to store all your stock library footage on (and not waste as much time clearing out drive space).

A big RAID can also be helpful for working with large HD files. I haven't been following RAID controllers closely to see how they stack up in performance and whether or not they corrupt your data.

4- You might be able to save some money on the DVD burner, depending on your needs.

5- In Windows XP SP2, you might see only 3GB of RAM.

6- Video card?

I think people have had problems with all brands.

Lacie doesn't make the hard drive that's in the enclosure... it is likely WD or Seagate or Maxtor or Hitachi etc. etc.
As far as external enclosures go, lots of people report problems with external drives. Definitely make sure that the drive is being cooled well (or have a backup plan in case the drive dies).