Legit Reviews

Hello all. My buddy is building a new PC that he will use mostly for video editing and encoding and stuff. He'll also be plugging it into a rather old 50" rear-projection TV. He's looking at some choices, and I would like some advice, since I don't do any editing, I'm not sure about what's best for that. For reference...he does NO GAMING!

Intel choice:
Asus P5QL (P43) + Core 2 Quad Q8200 + Radeon HD 4350

AMD choice:
Gigabyte 690GX + Phenom 9850

With Either:
Seageate 500 700.11
Enermax 450PSU
DVD-Multi (DL)
Thermaltake case

These two are identical in price for him, so it's down to which is better.

The one problem I see with the AMD is that his TV does NOT have HDMI, only coax and component input, and I've not seen an adapter for that board.

Any ideas? If you can find something similar, let me know, he's planning to buy next week.

Thank ya much.

Intel

Also, tell him to get the fastest cpu he can afford! Depending on what program he uses, most of them will use all 4 cores to edit video.

I also just read something about one of the apps being able to offload to the GPU and get even faster encoding speeds, but for the life of me I can not remember which program it was! If his program does that also, then he will want the fastest GPU he can afford also.

windows 64bit with no less than 4gb of memory

he should also have multiple hard drives! One to hold the programs, one for the raw video, one for the converted video.

Mike

If he is doing this professionally, he really needs to spend some money! I built one for around $4500 with a 32" lcd about 2 years ago.

He's not doing any professional editing. Just stuff he takes while traveling around the world for his family and a documentary he's thinking about putting together.

I forgot to mention, yeah 4GB of RAM and Vista 64 Ultimate.

He's on a bit of a tight budget right now because he just had to dump a lot of cash into a new apartment, so his PC budget took a hit from that and the current exchange rate blows donkey gonads. If he had bought 4 months ago, he could've spent about $2,000. That's down to about $900 now. Unfortunately, he can't wait any longer as his laptop is dying and he's got lots of video to work on from the past few months.

get a very fast cpu, core i7 if he can afford it, along with a 300gb velociraptor and a 1tb drive for storage

martini161 wrote:get a very fast cpu, core i7 if he can afford it, along with a 300gb velociraptor and a 1tb drive for storage

That would be an excellent machine for him to purchase if it weren't for the fact that the MB and the CPU alone would exceed his budget by about 25% without even looking at RAM, HDDs, etc.

This is not for hard-core editing. It's simple editing of videos that he takes on vacation to send back home. He's also thinking about doing a bit of a documentary with his clips for fun.

then a 45nm quadcore will be fine. fast video editing requires a fast harddrive, which is why i recomended a velociraptor

KPRROK wrote:I forgot to mention, yeah 4GB of RAM and Vista 64 Ultimate.

If the MOBO can support six slots of RAM, then 6Gb of RAM would be very helpful.

I've been doing audio editing now for the past three years of so. Much memory is needed to cut, paste, crop audio in large blocks. Even harder is to cut and mix into another audio set.

Video on the other hand would require 4Gb or more.

His goal of a great machine would be a workstation vs. a simple high ended PC build.

martini161 wrote:then a 45nm quadcore will be fine. fast video editing requires a fast harddrive, which is why i recomended a velociraptor

Not really, capturing the video requires minimum HDD speeds but most 7200RPM drives are fine. HDD speed while editing the video is really irrelevant. CPU speed and RAM are king when rendering the video.

but chances are unless your only editing small video's, the whole video isnt going to fit in the ram so youll be using the page file which is why i recommend a faster harddrive. but you are right in saying that cpu and ram are required to render video's