Dale, I understand how you feel. While overall I've had pretty good experience with Dell, I bought underpowered systems that were not designed for video editing and that drove me to build my own again after a year off from DIY.

I believe for a while I even argued pretty adamantly that you couldn't do as well building your own as you could by buying pre-built. I was wrong, very wrong. I was even warned about certain brands having inferior power supplies, and I ignored it. And I paid the price.

I now have a monster of a case that will probably last for years, 1350 watts of power that will probably be adequate for a long time, and I feel great about it. I only need to upgrade the CPU and MOBO next time, (hopefully not the ram) and while that is a pain, I am proficient enough at it that I actually enjoyed doing it this time. Went without a hitch.

Darren, I was at Microcenter today and asked about charges to build a system. They quoted me $86. I think that is waay reasonalble.

Thanks Jeff. I was just going to send the Denver store an email for a quote but couldn't find a direct email address so will call them in the morning. After looking at their website this is what I am considering. I welcome any comments, suggestions and advice. I am using Sony Vegas so GPU isn't a major factor. Would love to hear what others have in their system.

* Intel i7 920
* ASUS P6T Deluxe
* 6Gb Triple Channel (DDR3) 1600MHz (Corsair)
* WD Caviar Black 500Gb (system)
* WD Caviar Black 750Gb or 1Tb (media)
* EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GT 512MB GDDR3 PCIe 2.0
* Case: Antec 300
* PSU: Corsair TX 650 Watt ATX Power Supply

I must admit I wasn't overly impressed the the selection of DVD burners and card readers on their site. Jeff, Is what they have on their website the full selection or do they have others in stock.

Depending on the budget I am given I would consider upgrading to a velociRaptor for the system drive. Is there anything else I should look at upgrading?

If you are going to overclock, you should get at least 850W PSU. If not consider 750W. The i7 is power hungry.

You can buy a DVd burner and card reader elsewhere. If you get externals of both of those they can be quite handy. I personally have an external DVD burner that I love (Sony) and it has been more reliable than any internal drive I've ever owned.

I imagine if it is not listed it's not available, but remember they are going to have misc items laying around the store that might not be listed.

jeff, and others,




what would be really good now is to have a posting of those integrated systems that have successfully gone together well and work as high profile editing machines.


then someone like myself, can look at the lists of components and make solid decisions on what they want to invest in and actually know they can pull it off!!!!

I am sure I could build one, just do not have enough knowledge to know what components to acquire so i do not waste time and money in particular.



could be done on a spread sheet.


any takers???

Videoguys lists their build ingredients, but I don't agree with their selection of a 1TB OS drive. It doesn't make sense to me to not buy a Velociraptor at $159.

My new iCore 7 Build...

MSI X58 Pro
iCore 7 920 2.67Ghz
6Gig Tri-Channel OCZ 10666
EVGA 295Gtx
Auzentech 7.1 Prelude
3-1TB Hds Seagate
LG Blu-ray Burner
Lite on Lightscribe DVD Burner
800Watt Tagan PS

Replaced my Q9550 Quadcore setup...
Rendering recent HD project with Q9550 quadcore using Vegas 8 Pro exceeded 3 Hours
Same project using the new iCore 7 920 took no more than 1 Hour 10 minutes....
Huge difference......Well worth the investment...

The raptors are past their time. I didn't even bother to use them in my new build. Look at the read write times it's a minimal improvement at best.

from toms hardware
ave write
raptor 150gb 101 Mb/s
seagate 1.5 tb 98.2 Mb/s

ave read
raptor 150gb 102 Mb/s
seagate 1.5 tb 99 Mb/s

maximum write
raptor 150gb 123.9 Mb/s
seagate 1.5 tb 127.3 Mb/s

maximum read
raptor 150gb 124.6 Mb/s
seagate 1.5 tb 127.3 Mb/s

Once you factor in cost per GB is a no brainer to me to run the 1.5 TB Seagates instead.

Ken, you shouldn't focus on transfer speeds/read write times when discussing drives for an OS. You will come out looking uninformed, to put it politely. Access/Seek and I/O performance times are what counts. I/O performance of the Velocirpator is well over 2X that of the Seagate (193 I/O per second vs the Seagate at 90 I/O per second).

Velociraptors are a 10K drive and are by far much better suited for OS applications. They access data MUCH faster than the Seagate, it isn't even a contest. Access/seek time is what are looked at for OS drives, as well as I/O performance, which is where the Seagate is "disappointing" (Toms Hardware). Transfer speed is relatively irrelevant for an OS drive.

The Caviar Black (my personal choice for 1tb drive) outperforms the Seagate in the most important areas and is much more reliable. If one looks only at transfer speeds, you are missing the picture altogether.

The Seagate is a poor choice for workstations that require high transaction performance, as Tom's says.

As of now the Velociraptors are still dollar for dollar a better choice than even SSD drives.

Transfer rates are more important for drives used as backup, etc., and while the 1.5 Seagate has fast transfer rates it is by far the most problem plagued drive that I have ever seen. If you google the darned thing you will find page after page of DOA drives, drives that die after a few months, and even the firmware is not helping everyone. I am a hard drive fanatic, and I would not use one if it was free.

According to one physicist, the drives are an accident waiting to happen. If anyone here is using them with good results, that is fine, and my compliments to you. I have nothing against them, but as an OS drive they are among the poorest of choices.

Additionally, to have a 500GB or greater OS drive allows the page file and program files to be spread over a ridiculously large area unless you set your page file to a static size. And no, degragmenting does not solve this issue. And even then why would you want an OS drive with more than 50GB or even 100GB of data on it? You are not supposed to put media on the OS drive anyway.

To quote Tom's Hardware: "This is reflected in the workstation I/O performance per watt efficiency test, where it is just a bit better than the aged, power-hungry Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 with its five platters."

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, ST31500341AS (1.5 GB) - Review Tom's Hardware : Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda: Bigger And Better?

Guys - some very good points on both sides about system drive choice. I'll throw the big wrinkle in. It may not happen with DIY8, but sometime in the near future system drives will be SSD. We are already seeing this in some high end laptop configurations.

I like our choice of system drive for the reasons given in the article. That said, putting in a 10K RPM drive would increase performance for many OS tasks. So the trade off in size vs. speed (seek / access) is really up to personal preference.

Gary

Gary, SSDs are an exciting prospect, Gary, for the future, but you are correct, of course, they are not yet ready for prime time for the video editor. Many still do not have the performance advantage of Velociraptors or SAS drives. That is going to change, of course, but as of now....no.

Their use in laptops is the perfect application for them as of now.

Regarding the small drive vs large OS drive thing: I noted in the article you say, regarding small boot drive: "While it's (good for office computing and maybe gamers, it's not so good for video editing. You don’t ever want to have a clogged up C: drive in your NLE workstation."

I wonder how or why the average video editior fill a 150GB boot drive more than even 40%?

I have Vegas 8.1 and 8.0c, Premier Pro, The Adobe Master Collection which includes Photoshop, After effects, Fireworks, Adobe Acrobat Pro, etc., Nero 8, and my page file is 15GB in size, yet my 150GB drive is 75% empty!

You can use the 1GB drives for OS and it will work fine. I personally love the performance of a fast drive. Programs open SO fast and perform so well. Photoshop opens for me in less 1 second.

I still find Vegas HD projects open way too slowly, but there is nothing to be done for that as of now short of putting my media files on a RAID array.

I noticed your RAID array for your media storage drive, and now with HD (HD is new to me) you've got me thinking about RAID again. With SD I didn't need it, but this HD stuff is killing me!

I dont my use OS drive for media storage it has 5 partitions
1 XPpro I use for day to day stuff word/etc with firewall and molasses-ware stuff for web use.
2 Vista 64 with only my editing progs
3 Vista 64 with only gaming progs
4 Windows7 for testing
5 Empty partition for future use.
This way I get to use the machine variably without slowing down anyone function.

Then I have a 4 drive array for source files.
and lastly 1 drive I use a write to drive for renders and I use this for none editing media (music files mainly).
I guess on my last computer I wasnt impressed with the raptor vs the raid in that computer. Seems I'm wrong.

If you don't see the difference then it doesn't matter. You're happy, and that is all that counts.

Gentlemen,


I partitioned my 750 gb os drive that came with my 435 xps. I simply cut it into two. would it be wiser to nail it down even smaller? I use it only for editing aand only plug it in to go online for support or such. I run adobe suite, some other video user programs and Vegas of course. I do have Office on it but that is about all.


Now, I have a box for hot plugging in two hard drives whenever i want. Can a Velociraptor be benificial in this circumstance?

I had two seagate hd's die two clicks apart this spring!!! I want to move away from them!!!

The WD 1tb Blacks are very nice as media drives. If you're needing media drives, Raptors are great but small. I do use a Velociraptor as a "work" drive (or a some people call it scratch drive). I also use a VR as my OS drive. But if you're already running fine, you don't need to change unless you have money to spare.

I personally like to keep my OS drive closer to under 50GB. Less area for things to be spread over.

Re: hot plugging, I'm think some drives might be better suited for that purpose than others, but I'm not sure.

For those looking to upgrade their PC, I need to announce I just rendered a 65 minute SD video video, with some slow motion, and some color correction, in 11:30. I knew this thing was fast, but even I am shocked. This happened on a i7 920 processor rendering to the same hard drive as the original media is located. I'm sure there are those who get faster render times, and I'm not bragging. It is just such a time saver.

Jeff, I just had to wipe the drool off my desk, especially as my new NLE computer has been put back a couple of months. :(

This is a good thing though. If we bought it now it would end up in the "dungeon" rather than at my desk (some wierd decisions coming from higher up). Hopefully the price of the i7 will have dropped even more by that time.

Lets hope so.

My 9650 do rendertest-hdv.veg in 34 seconds
 

Greetings everyone, have been reading your results from a very long time. I do not know if I am doing anything wrong on my vegas 8.1 but I try to render the rendertest-hdv.veg and everytime I come up with 35/37 seconds.

My settings in Vegas is;
Profile: 60i HDV 1080-60i (1440x1080, 29.970 fps), 8 bit, BEST

Save as; suggested by user who posted the rendertest.
Audio: 48,000 Hz, 16 Bit, Stereo, PCM Uncompressed.
Video: 29.97 fps, 1920x1080, Upper field first.
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.000, using Sony YUV codec. OpenDML compatible.

I am not on Corei7 but Q9650, I do not know much about my system setup, I bought a second hand pc with raid 0 drive. I have been told that my processor has been o/c but I do not know how to check.

Anyone know? Please let me know.

Regarding the i7 920 and overclocking: I have found that even though tests show a stable overclock at 3.8, I've been running into issues with Gearshift and Neo Scene running at that speed. Everything else has been running fine however.

I lowered my clock speed from 3.8 to 3.4 and lowered my voltages accordingly and all seems well. I'm keeping it a 3.4 from this point on. The speed difference is minimal, and I feel satisfied that I ran for a couple of months at 3.8. I never have or will achieve 4.0 which had been my goal, but because I'm not willing to invest in the more elaborate cooling solution I'm having to live with what i've got. Overall this is a great processor.

The pressure for capacity is great, but does anyone need a HUGE drive for the system drive? It should store OS and applications and very be fast. This is the drive that is hit the most during operation, and failure shouldn't result in losing projects or files.

Other important factors are access times, for which the Raptors have no match. For rendering one or more video streams, sequential read/write performance will be served well by any drive unless you are reading and writing to the same drive. If you hear your disk churning, you will benefit from the faster access times.

I take it this was a render to MPEG2 DVDA preset? Is that a single or two pass?

What about the same project to the 3MB SD WMV? I found that WMV renders are horribly horribly slow. MPEG2 is speedy by comparison.

no kidding. I get 11min render times for projects that are several minutes long.... not over an hour long!

The number of partitions has no effect on performance (well, actually it has a negative affect, not a positive affect!). Having an OS drive and a media drive is the way to go.

Yes Jason it was a single pass mpeg 2 render of course, wmv would have taken somewhat longer.

Same project on my old Q6600 would have taken 30 minutes, as it usually rendered 1/2 real time (without MB, etc.)

I did a benchmark test on a i7 320 vs Q6600. I created a digitally generated file in Sony Vegas Pro and rendered it out in MPEG2 HDV 50i. Both systems had a RAID0 setup. The Q6600 took 27 minutes to complete render the i7 320 took 20 minutes. This makes the i7 30% faster than the Q6600 which would reduce render times on a 5hour render to 3.5hours, not bad if you ask me.

Not bad Nick, but pretty slow compared to overclocked. Your i7 is running at stock speed I'm sure. I bought the i7 with overclocking in mind, as it's overclocking features are designed to be exploited.

I noticed that you and Jason mention RAID 0 a lot. I personally have never noticed raid to be a factor in rendering times. I suppose if you compare render times from a slow drive to the times from a RAID array there could be a difference. Difference for me in render times doesn't occur with any of my drives.

Jeff not sure if RAID0 makes any impact on rendering myself, I was merely trying to keep system configurations constant. RAID0 is very effective for playback when editing multi-tracked projects. Was running stock speed.

Interesting stuff
 

Good evening,

I am , as I write, rendering a blu ray of 20.7 gigs of hdv video. I threw up the task manager to see whatis happening.

it is going at lightening speed, all 8 cpus are operating at 7o to 80% capacity.

rendering audio is requiring 3% of the cpu using only 2 cpus and 1.92 gigs of Ram.

Of course I relaize vista takes a fair amount of ram just to operate too!!

to my real surprise it is only using 2.1 g of RAM!! Here i was considering of upping the annie to 12 gigs and I am only using 35% of what I already have!!!

Sense I did a little morre tweaking to my system the cpu useage went up from about 60%, it is at 76 at this moment (I am on a different computer by the way).



An interesting note for this I7 on vista. I loaded up Front Page to work on my web page and then found that the computer would not capture!!!!!!! I thought this was the same problems I had sometime back and I was ready to pitch this dell at a Dell rep. I went back and restored my computer to before Iput front page in and all is well again!!!!

so, it seems some form of microsoft dealing with graphics is the primary issue that caused me so much trouble in the past (I had installed all my software).


I would highly recommend installing one at a time, testing all systems , and then moving onward with the next.

In hind sight I reckon it was the microsoft software that casued the problem back in january!!!!

Gee Dale, no one would have EVER imagine Front Page could cause those issue...great that youknow what it is!

Jeff,

I never would have thought Front Page could cause a problem!!! I had pulled all my video applications off and all that, you know the drill!! Left front page on until I reinstalled vista. Just had not got around to front page as I have been to busy with jobs.

It also makes me suspecious of all software now. My editing computer is only going to have necessary support programs!!




By the way, my adobe after affects 6.5 pro, when I load it the os states i should not load it because it will slow down computer start up. but then cS2 doesn,t go figure

Now i am really wondering about that.

the I7 is great!! but vista is taking some getting used to!!

I only mention RAID because when I am multi-caming a 3 cam shoot, I get slow frame rates. Now that could be the CPU trying to play 3 DV streams and not a HDD issue. I'm not sure.

Jason, I also find for multicam playback can be smoothed with faster drive setup for multicam. Rendering on the other hand seems to be the same.

Building a new system: Full tower, 4 500gb sata drives, 12mb ram, Vista 64 ultimate, Intel i7 920. In the past I would put my OS on the C drive and load Vegas and associated files on a seperate drive. Is this the optimal setup?

No it isn't.
Optimal setup is OS and all programs on drive C, captures and all other project media (music, images, logos, grahics, etc.) on drive D and finished renders on drive E.

Thanks, I'd like to get things set up at least mostly correct the first time.

No problem Harry.
Remember to invest in backup software (such as True Image from Acronis) and image the drive twice, once after your OS install and a second one after all software is installed and running successfully.
After that, weekly images are recommended.
This way, if something does get messed up, you have a recent restore disk set ready to go.

Thanks again, I already have PC Backup Pro, it backs up absolutely everything you tell it to, including the registry and other settings.

In that case, you're all set.
Enjoy your new toy :-)

Case comes today, everything else comes tomorrow.