Yeah when I bought my Toshiba it was between the P25 and an HP widescreen model.

Powerbook? Are you kidding- for the same price my 3.0ghz P4 Toshiba runs circles around a powerbook. Plus the Toshiba can run Vegas. ;)

Glen:

You do have to replace the 2 x 256 in order to upgrade to 1 GB. I bought 2 x 512 and gave my 256's on exchange. Hard to give you a precise quote, but it did cost me around US$300.00 here in Brazil.

If you can affort the upgrade, no matter the cost, it worth every dime. It's became a brand new machine.

Kindest Regards,
Gus

new info?
 

Hi,

This thread is pretty old, so I'm assuming some of you have upgraded. I've just about had it with these pieces of crap desktop PCs I've been trying to use. I'd like to see if I can afford something that will edit Vegas (I've still got version 5) and burn to DVD; essentially, I would like to replace my desktop machines altogether. Being able to take it to town with me would be really helpful.

If you're happy with what you're using these days, care to share? Specs would be most welcome. :)

Wow... this thread was revived after a year and a half!

I like editing on my laptop. I have a Sager, 3.4GHz Pentium 4, 800MHz FSB, 1 Gig ram, two 60Gig 7200RPM drives, and 17" widescreen.

Yep it is amazing, but hey - we always want to move up.

So here's what I'm looking for, and I wonder if somebody out there has put together a system recently.

I'm running Vegas 6.0C, and I want to build a desktop. Thinking I'll be doing HD fairly soon, so I wanted to find out what the right way to go: Lots of Ram or Duel core processor? I'm feeling like a AMD 4800 would be fine, but can I do it with 1 gig of ram? The next thing is a video card, with a duel monitor setup - suggestions? Finally what are folks using for sound cards these days? I've been using a hammerfall DSP multilink for a while, but I think that there are probably newer cards out there, or are there motherboards with decent sound these days? My issue with built in sound has always been the lack of decent - that is quarter inch - ins and outs. So folks there you have - I guess the last piece is a nice quiet power supply. I've used Seagate Baracudas for years so I'm sticking with that.

I'd love to hear if anybody has build a machine like this lately.

Thanks!
Milt

Milt,
John Rofrano has built a system identical to the training systems we use for clients. http://www.johnrofrano.com/pcequipment.htm
this is a smokin', not too expensive system, that he's doing HDV on, as are we for clients that come to Utah for training.

Colfax International builds these very nicely for video, so does Velocity Micro. Colfax has outstanding customer support, and while Velocity has a slightly nicer case, they have the crappiest customer support I've ever encountered. We ended up building 4 of our own after the Velocity Micro experience.

In my opinion, you could save a lot of money off Johnny's configuration and not notice anything. Some of the parts are premium-priced and don't really make a difference for video editing.

In particular, the premium/low-latency RAM and the 10k rpm Raptor.

low latency RAM doesn't make a difference
hard drive speed on rendering

The motherboard you should be able to save money on. I never really understood the point of the premium-priced motherboards... that have lots of features you probably won't use.

For low noise, silentpcreview.com has lots of great info on what parts are quiet. Last time I checked seasonic had quiet PSUs, and samsung hard drives are the quietest (followed by seagate) [rubber grommeting is one way to reduce hard drive noise, as is enabling AAM].

2- RAM: If you run many programs at once (i.e. multiple instances of vegas, photoshop in background, web browser, etc.) then more RAM will help. Otherwise 1GB should be fine. As far as I know, HD(V) doesn't make a difference in RAM consumption.

3-Motherboard sound: Unless it's digital in/out, analog sound will always be compromised by interference from everything else on the motherboard. You can hear interference when transferring files over the network or whatever.

Thanks guys - I hadn't seen the m-audio 410 and it looks very very hot. Exciting to say the least. I'm also going to check out the whole - low noise/no noise thing as I'm tired of not being able to just lay down a voice track without going through a whole move to the other room thing.

I didn't see a monitor there - suggestions? I am hooked on duel monitors for vegas, and I"m even thinking of doing 2 for editing, and an external for preview, and final rendition (did I say that?)

What's the deal with the monitors - are you guys getting a big old plazma thing so that you can see all the detail, or is a smaller but more acurate display a better idea?

Thanks again,
Milt

One more thing - I'm not a gamer so what is the best quiet video card out there for editing? Suggestions?

Milt

Any video card will do. Vegas doesn't take advantage of many of the hardware accelerations created for gamers anyway.
As far as the display, hopefully no one here is using a plasma. Plasma not only WON'T show the detail, but would die a fast, costly death. Plasma has serious problems with burn-in. LCD doesn't. If you're doing HD, you pretty well need an LCD system, but if you're doing SD, you pretty well need a CRT for external monitoring. For the computer monitors themselves, anything will do, CRT or LCD.

Heh heh. Waste not... :)

Edward, I haven't tried to price one with the specs you listed (I'm assuming it's a custom build), but I will. Never heard of Sager until now. Thanks so much!

Yep, thanks for the good monitor info.

As for SAGER, I used one for a year and really loved it. Very fast, good price, alot more computer for the money if you need or want a laptop. I edited video on mine all the time I had it, and it never let me down.

Milt