Good Morning,

Sata is great because you can configure it in raid 0, Correct??

I found out even with the old p 4 that it was always better to have the hard drives in the case as apposed to using external hard drives. With the external sata port one could get a super box or external house that can have two or more drives in it, provided they can hook up sata.

I saw the same deal with the monitor but passed on it as I already have a 22, 28, and dual 19's. the price is amazing. I do not think I could have bought the components for that, and then have to deal with building and configuring it as well, oh yea and buying a new os too.

It was supposed to be here yesterday, I am getting anxious.

Shot my first xlh1 footage yesterday and want to process it!!

Alastair,
What caddy do you use for your external drive and would you still recommend it?

I don't see that the FW ports are FW800. Do the ports look the same and how do you tell?

Newegg.com - eSATA docking station

Take your pick!

I just picked Firewire 800 as an example to demonstrate how much faster eSATA was.

Check out Dell outlet for great deals on the XPS 435MT i7. I picked up the following for $699

i7 -920 (2.67 Ghz)
6GB Mem
ATI 4850 - 512MB
2 500GB - in RAID 1 configuration

Crazy deal, it was $750 after tax and shipping. I do like to tweak my own systems and generally build my own, but couldn't resist. At some point the x58 motherboards will drop in price and I may just upgrade the motherboard to overclock. The standard system are locked in the BIOS to prevent all overclocking. I have a power supply from my current computer that will be more than enough. It is a mATX motherboard, so it could require I move it all to a new case also if mATX prices are too high.

Oh, and Dell outlet will come back w/ no systems a lot because of ebayers are scarfin up the deals. Check out "Outlet Scanner". A Tool that will continuously refresh and add systems to your cart. I used it to pickup this great deal, and alwasy check out slickdeals.net for the latest Dell coupons.

Hope this helps out some i7 buyers.

Can't wait, mine arrives on Thursday.

Josh, congrats. Remember that Dell cases won't take non-Dell MOBOs. They are designed that way deliberately. Same with power supplies.

I keep meaning to set aside some time to make a post here regarding my most recent system build but for some reason can't quite get around to doing a review the way I would want to, so I'm just going to chime in on some of the highlights here...

- Built my own X58 based i7 2.60Ghz setup on a Gigabyte Motherboard (DS4) with 6Gb of Triple Channel RAM. Spent approximately $1900 on the build including two 24" Acer Monitors (killer deal at newegg, couldn't resist) which means the 'box' cost me about $1300.

- I don't typically overclock, but because I put an expensive $80 cooler on the chip, I figured I had to, so I clocked it up to 3.0Ghz (a modest overclock). It was a piece of cake to overclock and my system temps are relatively very low and I have a *very* quite PC running inside an Antec P182 case which are my favorite cases.

- I'm running a 10,000rpm 160Gb WD hard drive as my main system (application/OS) drive. I have a WD 1TB Caviar Black Drive for storage, and I hooked up 2 - 500Gb WD drives into a RAID 0 using the motherboards SATA controller.

- My OS of choice is Vista Ultimate 64-bit and, of course, I'm running Vegas 8.1 alongside Vegas 8.0c.

Boys.... Let me tell you.... I've built my fair share of systems over the years... This is my favorite computer build by far... I've not yet had a single hickup or error of any kind whatsoever. I burned in with Prime, etc and the system passed with flying colors. This thing just flat out kicks booty. I've not taken the time to benchmark it and I probably won't because I don't need to. It's extremely snappy in terms of load times, etc and as stable as it could possibly be. I *highly* recommend anybody moving into a new system very seriously *only* consider a pc built on this i7 chip.

In terms of editing performance....
Unfortunately, I've not had the time to really load a whole lot of footage onto the timeline and play around but what I have done has left me quite impressed. Video Preview speed is one of the biggest factors as to why I took the upgrade plunge and thus far I'm very satisfied. HDV 1080i footage on the timeline is pegged at 29.97 almost regardless of what I do to the footage and how large I preview it. I've done a little bit of full screen preview, but I mostly work (and am totaly satisfied) with my video preview being 1/2 resolution at 960x540.

A couple of small Vegas quibbles
I'll be quite honest though in that I think I'm frankly a little frustrated in the preview quality of images in the preview window in Vegas in general - not performance but just the visual quality. Maybe my standards have just come up but I think Vegas really needs to go back to the drawing board on this functionality of their software. I viewed similiar HDV footage on a MAC computer the other day and Final Cut did a much better job of previewing video on the timeline. I was frankly a little embarassed.

I'm also really wanting to find and invest in a really good archival intermediate codec to use that will perform very well on the timeline and allow me to get the video out of the highly compressed HDV stage and into something a little more allowing for me in terms of color space and bit-depth. Cineform is close, but their HD package is $500 and doesn't yet support 64-bit version of Vegas, so I'm left in need there...

Anyhow, from a value standpoint, the Dell systems are going to offer far more bang for the buck and I'd recommend them highly. If you are comfortable building your own rig and don't mind spending a few extra bones though, you can build a great system...

Jon

Regarding preview quality, I've always thought PP had great playback quality. I have it, and won't install it. It's just too darned awkward to use.

I agree Vegas could use some work in this area.

Congrats on your new system.

Well...it would appear that when rendering, Vegas WILL use all 8 cores of my i7. Whereas DVD Architect only uses one.

Rendering a 2hr 6min m2t file as an MPEG2 PAL stream in Vegas and it is on schedule to complete in 1hr 18mins....woohoo!

Near enough the same file as part of a DVD with a small Highlights and Messages sections is showing as 1hr 6mins complete with 9hrs 6min still remaining......BLIMEY!

I should add, both those renders are running at the same time and i can still happily open another project and edit away whilst browsng yada yada yada.

That will be the last render I let Architect do!

Anybody got any good tips on how to avoid the lottery of rendering a file that ends up just too big for the DVD (which is why i always liked letting Architect fit to disc option)

Oh....and i totally agree that the preview quality of Vegas is one of the major frustrations. Some kind of hardward assisted option would be great.

Use a bitrate calculator to determine your encoding settings.
That way all DVDA has to do is a quick "Prepare" (after you've created gorgeous menus, of course!!).
Here's a link (to a zipped file) to the one I use all the time.
Thanks to John Cline for hosting it.

Would 12gb memory instead of 6gb give you much better performance with Vista Home Premium 64 bit? I am looking at the ASUS P6T motherboard.

Currently I'm only working with 6Gb in Tripple Channel mode and though I can't say for sure, I get the 'feeling' that the extra 6Gb wouldn't do me much good. I know 64-bit software can recognize more memory, but I also understand that it actually physically uses more memory. With that said, 6Gb is still a lot of memory and it's my hunch that only the harshest of projects would benefit from more at this point.

Jon

Thanks. Reading this thread is dangerous to my wallet :) I just ordered the parts to build a new I7 system 64 bit Vista system, including a 6 Gb triple channel memory set.

I have a Geforce 7600 250 Mb video card from my old system. Would upgrading to a Geforce 9600 512 Mb card help with video performance? The card works fine with Photoshop.

Well, the i7 is worth it. This is the biggest thing since Pentium, even bigger, IMO.

You're card is fine, don't waste your money unless you use MB, then check their site before you buy or ask on here which cards are best.

Yes, as Jeff pointed out, your card is fine as long as it's a PCI-E card... :-)

Jon

Thanks again. I forgot that the card in that case is AGP. I just put in an order for new card.