Can I use a Server for Editing Purposes?
 

I have a Dell PowerEdge 830 that I'm consider using for my NLE system. Is there anyresin this wont work as opposed to going out and buying a new system (I already own the server). Here are the specs. P4, 2.80 ghz 2.0 gb ram. I will be using Pinnicale for editing my HD footage. Any thoughts on the viability of this?

Hi Ken,

There is no reason you can't use a Server platform as your Video Workstation.
That's the good news.

The bad news is that a Pentium4 anything is going to be painfully slow for editting HD footage. Go ahead and give it a try, but I think you will find reason to upgrade to something more current pretty fast. HDV will be painfully slow, if possible at all. AVCHD will be simply impossible.

I pretty much have the same specs on one of our Dell Dimension workstations. I don't use Pinnacle, I use Sony Vegas 8.0 on that machine and editing HD is slow, but not unusable.

Dell servers are champs. I recently retired a server that had been running 24/7 since 2001. There's no reason I couldn't hook it up and use it again tomorrow (other than the fact I don't need it...)

Sometimes you have problems with some programs not running or loading correctly on servers. I have several Dell Servers Including the PE2950 with RAID 1 for O/S and RAID 5 for Data all with 146GB 15K drives. I'm running Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition R2 64-bit and I had difficulty getting the drivers loaded properly for my Sound Card. The video card options are limited to because rack mount servers have limited expansion card options. this server has Dual core-dual 3.4Ghz XEON processors. I use it mainly for video streaming and encoding. You might also have problems getting some capture cards to run right. I also have a PE830, PE 2850, PE2450 and PE 2400.

I'm going to be getting the new dual Quad-Core Server soon. For editing I picked up a Dell XPS Studio with i7 Intel processor running at 2.96Ghz with 4GB of 1066 3 way Ram Memory and RAID 0 (sata 640GB drives) with 4Gbs Fiber Channel HBA for SAN high speed storage. It also has a 512GB Video card and Dell 30" monitor. Yes and of course it has a blu ray burner. I had to get Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition so the blu ray to work right. I'm also running a 10GbE ethernet backbone to transfer big files around fairly quickly.

I have been looking everywhere for a server motherboard that supports dual (multiple) Core i7 chips and i have yet to find one.

The Video Server I am designing is to be based on the Xeon i5520 chipset just because i could not find a system board that supports multiple i7 chips.

Here are the specifications of the system i am designing.
this is to be used for video archiving, searching, rendering and burning video files to DVD.

TYAN ~(S7016)
(2) Quad-Core Xeon X5560 , 2.8GHz
24 gigs of DDR3 1333
256 GB SATA2 SSD SLC system drive for the OS
256 GB SATA2 SSD SLD application and swap file drive
16 TB Raid 5 SAS
(2)Blue-ray/DVD/CD burner
Windows Server 2008 64bit

there will be two satellite work stations that are i7 Core based that will be networked to the Video Server.

do you have information on a system board that can utilize multiple i7 core CPUs?

[edit] i see that you are not looking at getting a multiple core i7 server, (the i7 does not have Xeon architecture yet), you are just using the i7 as an editing workstation.
lol
sorry bout that.
the biggest issue with being in the federal government, we are not allowed to use Vista so we are stuck with windows XP professional.
:-(