OP "may" mean a workstation for $3K, not necessarily for editing 2K video source.

sorry, yes I meant about $3.000.00 to spend

this one is only 2541?


DIY8 Hotrod $$$
ASUS P6X58-E Pro 220
Intel i7-980 Hex Core 580
G.SKILL Ripjaws 24GB (6 x 4GB) SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) 150
WD VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX 600GB 10,000RPM 250
Quadro4000 849
Antec Nine Hundred Two v3Black ATX 119
CORSAIR CMPSU-850TX 850W 135
Win 7 Prof OEM 139
BDR-206 99

$ 2,541

I'd suggest the DF 85 case over the Nine Hundred.
I have the Tweleve Hundred and it is great but the DF 85 or its smaller cousin makes it possible to get the HDD air filters out to clean them without pulling the case apart.

My other concern is that's a quite obscure mobo, no one even sells it down here. It's probably going to be fine but reading comments on it in the local fora everyone simply says if you want that kind of setup buy a Xeon mobo from the likes of Supermicro and then you are running buffered ECC RAM. Your probably going to spend more then on the mobo but you could save by ditching the 'Raptor for a 7200RPM disk and never notice the difference.

The Quadro 4000 is a very nice video card but if you're only running Vegas I doubt you'll get much more out of it than a much cheaper "gaming: card with the same number of cores and RAM. It also seems a tad wierd to be spending up big on a "pro" video card and not on a "pro" enterprise class mobo and RAM.

Bob.

It will certainly work fine but you're a little late to the party with a 980 processor. i7-2600K is the best you can do today unless you're really serious like Bob suggests and are will to spend Xeon money.

Xeons will get you multiple sockets with multiple cores in each socket. Not for the faint of heart.

I'd lose the Raptor. I use an SSD but that will start a whole 'nother discussion on this forum.

"It will certainly work fine but you're a little late to the party with a 980 processor."

Yes and NO (maybe) :)

If you read the Videguys blog on the system the OP is basing this build on that 980 mobo offers a better buss architecture than the SB mobos which can cause you to suffer from a bottleneck moving data. Just how significant this issue is going to be in the real world is hard to say, I'd think it will depend on you adding other cards for video i/o and what kind of video you're working with.

Bob.

are you talking about this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115070

also, whats the difference between buying that and supermicro...?

"are you talking about this:"

That's the 2600k processor. Also, in the video guys link you posted, there is a i7-2600k option for about $1500 or a tweener with an LGA 1366 motherboard with a 950.

Though not focused on video editing Maximum PC shared some wisdom in their selection process for the Dream Machine 2011:

"You Have to Build it or Get Off the Pot"

"also, whats the difference between buying that and supermicro...?"

SuperMicro is a respected manufacturer of higher end motherboards for serious workstations and servers most of which use server chipsets. When using Xeon processors one can have multiple sockets and thus more cores, extremely large memory sizes and very high buss bandwidth for many host buss adapters for things like fiberchannel cards. You won't get very far up into server class machines before you no longer get the performance your paying for if you're running a single user workstation. Without the exception of uncompressed video or many tracks, many editors could spend money more effectively on faster cores.

"You won't get very far up into server class machines before you no longer get the performance your paying for if you're running a single user workstation. Without the exception of uncompressed video or many tracks, many editors could spend money more effectively on faster cores. "

I've had a Supermicro system for years, very reliable. SCS obviously think pretty highly of them as well, their Mastersuite Systems are all SuperMicro. Admittedly in terms of raw flops / dollar they are not stellar performers, especially the dual Xeon machine unless you're running very expensive disk arrays and / or fibrechannel but and I keep coming back to this, running large slabs of RAM without error correction is kind of asking for something to go wrong one day or almost every day.

Bob.

cool, i guess i will go buy now

anyway this is what i just bought at micro center

Core i7 2600K LGA 1155 Boxed Processor
asus p8z68 -v pro 1155 atx
patriot 8gb 2x4 d3 1333 dim g s
sytem drive = ocztech 120 gb ssd
pny gtx 570 1280 mb


if anyone sees a red flag or something wrong with this let me know because I could still call back and swap out something at this point.

Almost the same as what I use and I am very pleased with it. I do envy the GTX 570 though. My i7 system currently use the onboard Intel graphics which is not supported by VP11 (had to put the GTX 460 in the slow Q6600 when its graphics card expired - a new card for the i7 is on the list but has to wait a bit).

One question though, why 1333 dims and not 1600? The board works very well with the higher speed memory (I use a Corsair Dominator 1600 2x4Gb kit). I overclock to 4.5GHz and 1600 for the memory and it performs well.

If you intend to overclock you will need a better cooler than the stock cooler coming with the boxed processor.

Willem

"if anyone sees a red flag or something wrong with this let me know because I could still call back and swap out something at this point."

Should be fine, my only concern is the SSD.
Are they going to install the OS and set it up properly for you so the SSD doesn't wear out quickly?

Bob.

Bob, I agree on the SSD.

I opted for an old fassioned spinning drive for the boot drive and cash it with a small SSD. I have all the advantages of fast loading but writes go straight to the HDD. If the SSD fails, I turn of cashing and have lost nothing (I do keep a backup image of the HDD as well).

Willem.

One question though, why 1333 dims and not 1600? The board works very well with the higher speed memory (I use a Corsair Dominator 1600 2x4Gb kit). I overclock to 4.5GHz and 1600 for the memory and it performs well.


i did not know about that...maybe i should call and upgrade it?

also, is that buffered? I asked them about buffered VS non-buffered and they said it did not matter for this configuration (of course , I don't know either)


UPDATE: i called in and they said everything they have for this board is non-buffered. they also said they would swap the RAM for Corsair Dominator 1600 2x4Gb kit and overclock it ...thanks for the tip

they also said they did not regularly overclock the actual computer though so they are going to have a the tech call me tomorrow- any tips on what I should be asking him do to the computer?

re:

Should be fine, my only concern is the SSD.
Are they going to install the OS and set it up properly for you so the SSD doesn't wear out quickly?

and

I opted for an old fassioned spinning drive for the boot drive and cash it with a small SSD. I have all the advantages of fast loading but writes go straight to the HDD. If the SSD fails, I turn of cashing and have lost nothing (I do keep a backup image of the HDD as well).

--

at the store we had a discussion about weather or not to use the SSD or weather or not to use 2XSSD (1 with boot and 1 for cache). i personally know nothing about the pros and cons of each and the sales rep did not seem 100% clear either. He had to bring in 2 other guys who sort of sounded like they knew what they were talking about.

I am paying for the build so what is it that they should be doing to " set it up properly " ?

UPDATE: i called in and they said window 7 automatically sets the wear on SSD and it was only a problem in XP. the guy i spoke to maintained that I would not gain anything by using 2 SSD or using 1 drive for cache and one drive for os. he said that using ssd for os beats the advantages of the other.

system drive = ocztech 120 gb ssd

There have been a lot of issues lately with OCZ drives, even though I have an older OCZ drive that has been trouble free.

I would recommend the Crucial M4 128 , if it's not to late to change.

The memory speed has very little impact on Z68 performance, so I wouldn't worry about that, even though bumping the RAM to 1600 would not be much of a cost impact.


While I understand you are not into building it yourself, and probably not wanting to mess with over-clocking; however it is essentially a given that you can bump the 2600K processor to at least 4.2ghz with one simple change in the BIOS and no risk of instability .. Your system builders should be able to do that for you quite easily ..

I have an Asus Z68 based system and am very happy with it ..

What are you using for your data storage .. I use 2 x 1.5 spindle drives in a RAID 1 .

"i called in and they said window 7 automatically sets the wear on SSD and it was only a problem in XP. the guy i spoke to maintained that I would not gain anything by using 2 SSD or using 1 drive for cache and one drive for os. he said that using ssd for os beats the advantages of the other. "

Actually SSDs themselves do the wear levelling not the OS. The problem with wear levelling is it leads to fragmentation and performance goes down over time. If you want to know more then Google will find heaps for you to read, Win 7 has got some changes in it compared to XP to accomodate this issue by doing less writes and by supporting the trim function. Tom's Hardware explains it here to some extent.

The question you should consider is what advantage does using an SSD give you and how much impact will that have on what you're building this system for.
SSD have much faster read speeds than spinning disks so boot and application load times do improve. If booting the system and loading different applications is eating into your day as you wait for that to happen then yes, an SSD will give you a benefit. If not then they're a waste of money, in fact the money spent can give you a negative return because SSDs can require some maintainance to keep them at their peak.

Ideally to setup a system with an SSD you want all the temp and cache files to be on a different drive that withstand all the writing. SSDs are not all that fast when it comes to write times so there's not much to be lost putting the files that'll be written a lot on a spinning disk.

In terms of how Vegas will perform I suspect having the OS and the application residing on a SSD will make zero difference. Vegas will load faster, it'll take the same time to open a project, playback performance will not change and neither will render times.

To be blunt the kind of responses you're getting from your system integrator don't fill me with much confidence regarding their competance at building a system for your purpose. I'm not saying they're trying to rip you off or that you'll end up with a lemon but they just don't seem overly cognicent of the different demands made by editing video and playing games or running general office applications. You're spending a fair slab of money and some of that might be better spent paying the premium that businesses that specialise in our needs charge to cover the costs of engineers who are specialised in this field. There's also suppliers such as BOXx and Supermicro who have a proven track record.

Bob.

@Stringer

I will ask about Crucial M4 128 and yes I am going to press them on the overclocking...I think that will not be a problem but I also appreciate you mentioning the 4.2 bios tweak.

I currently use a Sonnet D500P extremal esata but the case I picked out (http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0361307) has hot swap bays so I am going to try just using those for my video files.

You could always get a stripped-down Mac Pro, add memory and Windows 7 on a Bootcamp drive, and have a Mac and a PC for the same price. It works for me. Although the Mac Pros are WAY overdue for an update.

VERY solid machines though.

@farss

tons of good info there, thanks

i agree that the service is not video centric but i was in a hurry and these guys (microcenter) are right up the street so that makes a big difference when i have to bring it in for repairs and whatnot. i had a quote in at a local video centric shop (im in atlanta so there are a few) but they took too long to get back to me. at first I thought that since i kind of knew what i wanted i would not matter as much, but of course id would be more reassuring to have real deal techs that only do video systems....oh well...live and learn

"Ideally to setup a system with an SSD you want all the temp and cache files to be on a different drive that withstand all the writing. SSDs are not all that fast when it comes to write times so there's not much to be lost putting the files that'll be written a lot on a spinning disk."

I will press them again tomorrow about writing temp and data to a different when i talk to the tech.

by the way, is that a bios setting too? where do you actually tell windows to write those file to another disk?

@MarkHolmes

yes I have been using a macpro 2,1 for a few years now with dual boot...it is awesome but I can no longer upgrade it