advice for building video editing PC?

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theodork

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Jun 15, 2004
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A few friends of mine need a PC for video editing, stuff like Adobe Premiere, and im not sure what makes a good video editing machine. I figured any low end video card is fine since they're not dealing with 3d, but would they benefit from having more than 512mb of ram or would they benefit from a A64 over a barton 3200+ ? I've heard P4s are better at video editing but I've also heard the gap is closing, but there is definitely still a price gap.

We'd like a good cost/performance ratio and something that will last, these people dont know too much hardware wise and would probably rather not mess with upgrades too often. THey were thinking of spending about $1000 at Dell without monitor and they have a few hard drives already from the various deals, and i assured them i could get them a better computer for less, and less is better in this case because it is a non profit organization.

I listed a basic machine, please critique it as needed:

My thoughts for now is:
Shuttle an35ultra
AMD Athlon XP barton 2500 @ 3200
512mb PC3200 ram
ATI 9200 SE (actually i have an old AGP Matrox card from 1999, would this be ok?)
120gb hard dr
optical drives as needed, plain case, case fans, sparkle PSU, etc.

for about $165 more dollars i can swap the mobo and cpu for MSI K8N Neo Platinum and Athlon 64 3000+, would that be worth it? For another $35 or so (total of $200 over the AXP system) i can get a Intel Pentium 4 3.0C 800MHz FSB and ASUS P4P800 Deluxe.

Thanks =D
 
p4 is definately the way to go for editing. With hyperthreading and windows xp i get around 40+fps encoding with sound to mpeg2 from xvid in TMPGenc. Athlons ive used haven't even come close to that. As for making it affordable get a 2.8C and any decent motherboard and you can hit 3.4ghz very easy. my 2.8C does 3.5 with the stock heatsink and kingston valuram. p4s are also very much so faster from my experience again. Also be sure to get fast hardrives.
 
Yes, you must go with a Intel Pentium 4 system if you're going to do editing. Find a nice 875 mobo, like a IC7, and at least a gig of ram.
 
I say that you should go dual and cheap. That means dual Pentium IIIs, or even better, Athlon XPs. Get a lot of cheap RAM too. Hard drives should be pretty fast. I'd suggest a RAID 0 configuration with 7200 or 10,000 RPM drives, balanced with a big, cheap and slow drive as a backup for the array. I know this sounds expensive but you don't have to go wild on the motherboard and processors. Athlon XPs in the 2xxx+ range go for real cheap, and offer better performance than any single Pentium 4--for this kind of thing, at least. Besides, HyperThreading doesn't hold a candle to bona fide SMP.

Here is a rough outline:

2 AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton)
Iwill MPX2 motherboard
1024 MB PC2700 DDR RAM, minimum
2 Western Digital WD360GD hard drives
Bargain-of-the-week hard drive of your choice (check SlickDeals, TechBargains, etc.)
ATi Rage XL PCI display adapter
Random CD-RW, CD-ROM, etc.
Some case
Fortron FSP530-60GNA ATX12V power supply
 
xonik said:
2 AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton)
Iwill MPX2 motherboard
1024 MB PC2700 DDR RAM, minimum
Click to expand...

If going a dual AMD route then thats the wrong combo.

The FSB on a MPX2 mobo is only 266 Mhz so a Barton will be underclocked.
So you need to get a 2400+.
Also if your going to be getting more than two sticks of ram then it will have to be ECC ram.

It all depends on how much multi-tasking they do if a dual would be better than a single.
If they do a lot of multi-tasking then look for a good dual cpu system.
If not the a fast P$ would be best.

Luck......... :D
u=Tigerbiten.gif
 
Tigerbiten said:
If going a dual AMD route then thats the wrong combo.

The FSB on a MPX2 mobo is only 266 Mhz so a Barton will be underclocked.
So you need to get a 2400+.
Click to expand...
Okay. I was just giving a rough outline, and a bad match was bound to happen. Please, thread starter, consult the 2CPU forums or our very own multiprocessing forum before buying anything, for the sake of compatibility.
It all depends on how much multi-tasking they do if a dual would be better than a single.
If they do a lot of multi-tasking then look for a good dual cpu system.
If not the a fast P$ would be best.
Click to expand...
Yes, but there's more to it than that. A lot of video editing programs are multithreaded, so they're going to take advantage of multiple processors regardless of the number of applications running.
 
If you are going to be using Adobe Premiere Pro then a Pentium 4 core CPU is what you want, be it a single P4 or Dual Xeon based system. If you get a HT P4 then Adobe will recognize it as a multiprocessor system and utilize the HT support. Adobe has highly optimized Premiere for the Pentium core so rendering times are MUCH less on them. I keep my P4 machines just for working with Premiere and game on my A64.
 
thanks for the advice.. still thinking about it all..

Anyone have numbers to give me an example of how much better P4 is over A64 or even AXP?

Because the P4s and A64 cost twice as much as AXP system, and i know they'll perform better but the question is HOW much better?

I'm still lured towards AXP systems simply because they are so cheap.. and wont be anything like half as slow even though it costs half as much.. Please educate me if im very wrong =D

Looking into dual CPU systems.. how much performance increase will that actually give in adobe premier? Is it possible to overclock with those boards? A dual 2500+ @ 3200+ sounds like it might be a good value it would work. I'll look in the other forums for answers too but It couldnt hurt to ask you guys too =D
 
theodork said:
Looking into dual CPU systems.. how much performance increase will that actually give in adobe premier? Is it possible to overclock with those boards? A dual 2500+ @ 3200+ sounds like it might be a good value it would work. I'll look in the other forums for answers too but It couldnt hurt to ask you guys too =D
Click to expand...
Here, this is the best I could find:

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000335

Now substitute those MP 2200+ CPUs with mobile Thoroughbred 2500+s, maybe even overclocked (apparently, 3200+ is frequently realized on several dual Athlon MP motherboards), and you would find that it would take a hell of a P4 to beat that.

The Iwill MPX2 and MSI K7D Master motherboards are supposedly good overclockers.
 
The question really answered first is which software package are you going to use to edit with. Once you determine that then check with the product's info and see if it has been optimized to a particular arcitecture, like Premiere Pro has. Then go with that platform, whatever it is.
 
I would get a p4, or dual xeons, if they are doing video editing and what to do it fast and right there is no way to go cheap. On my setup below ulead drags itself through the editing process, i use ulead and i would rec a higher video card and lots of ram if they use it at all, i can do real time rendering which saves lots of time but it kills video cards...
 
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