2 replies to this topic

[R6Nighthawk]

Hello everyone. As I was offered such good advice and suggestions on building my very first gaming rig last time I was here, thought I would return for help with another build that's a little different.

I've got a friend who wants a rig that can handle some serious video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. He knows very little about computers, but has done a bit of research to narrow down what he wants; he's set on a price range of $1000-$1500, wants 32gb of ram, and an i7 for the cpu.

Now if this was a gaming rig, I think I could easily help fill out the rest of the components, but I've no experience in video editing or building the rigs for it, so I've got a few questions:

How small of a tower could I go in building a video-edit rig? My rig is a mid tower, but I suspect one for my friend's needs could be met with a mini tower like the Ranger-M. Any thoughts?

With a $1k to $1500 budget, what sort of i7 should I be looking at? Running an amd cpu myself, so I'm not familiar with the differences between the 3770, 4770, 4930K, and other i7 iterations.

For memory, what kind of speed or cas latency might he need for editing video? Would DDR3 1600 like this suffice?

I have no idea as far as what kind of video card or mobo he will need. He doesn't plan to do any gaming. Will he need something decent, or could I even cheap out and grab a mobo with integrated graphics?

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Barbaric Soul]

Size of the case doesn't matter as much as making sure the case has good air flow. For the hardware to properly cool, the case needs to be capable of supplying fresh air to the heatsinks of the hardware inside the case. If you do go with a mini-tower like the Ranger-M, you need to make sure you pick a m-ATX form factor motherboard.

As for the i7 CPUs, the 3770 and 4770, while requiring different sockets and chipsets, and pretty even when it comes to performance. The 4770, depending on the application, will be between 5-10% faster than the 3770. They are both quad core CPU's with 8 processing threads. The 3770 is from the last generation of CPU's and requires a socket 1155 motherboard, while the 4770 is from the current generation of CPUs and requires a socket 1150 motherboard. The 4930 also uses a different chipset and socket compared to the 3770 and 4770. Also, the 4930 is a six core CPU with 12 processing threads that requires a socket 2011 motherboard.

As for memory, DDR3 1600 RAM with a CAS latency of 9 is about as fast as you need. Any faster will not net you any noticeable improvements.

As for the video card, I'm not too sure about this. It really depends on whether or not Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects can use a GPU to do it's work or if it is programmed to only use the CPU. Certain calculations can be performed much much faster using a GPU as compared to a CPU. Also, since Nvidia and AMD video cards work differently, just because the program is coded to use a GPU, doesn't mean it can use just any GPU. You will need to determine if the program uses OpenCL (AMD) or CUDA (Nvidia) to determine which brand GPU you will need, if the program can use a GPU at all.

Honestly, while there may be people here that can fully answer your questions, you will probably be better off going to a actual tech website for the questions you have. I highly recommend the tech site www.techpowerup.com

Edited by Barbaric Soul, 09 March 2014 - 06:29 AM.

[R6Nighthawk]

Cool! I will make sure to look up info on what premiere utilizes as far as the GPU goes, and definitely post on that site (techpowerup) for more advice. Thank you for the information!