Looking to build a new machine for Premiere

chixwithtrix · #1 (**permalink**) 09-05-2006, 05:32 PM

I'm into video editing as a hobby at the moment and am going to school to make it a profession. I have an old Pentium 4 2.4ghz processor and 256mb of ram...etc that refuses to render anything in Adobe Premiere Pro. edit* - I know it at least needs more RAM to function, but my multitasking suffers as well from Premiere to After Effects, etc so I figgured the best way would be to start over with newer technology that would last me longer than upgrading this older machine.

Needless to say I want to upgrade, though I am fairly computer illiterate when it comes to all the numbers. Please excuse my ignorance in my following questions:

I have $1200 for processor(s), mobo, RAM, and video card. (I can upgrade the RAM and vid card at a later date though). When I went on NewEgg I and looked around at Intel Xeon processors This is the one I was looking at
-I am assuming that Xeon's are only for dual processor applications?
-The only boards I could find for them were server boards. What exactly are server boards?
-Would this processor work well for a video machine? Are Xeons good for normal use (not server)?
The Xeon seemed to have what I was looking for, but I don't know if it would work or there were better things out there...?

Another Processor I was looking at was this one.
-Is it any good for a video editing application?

Is it better to have a faster clock speed processor, or one that has high FSB and cache? Also, what is hyperthreading?

I will leave it at that for now until I narrow down what processor is good for me. Thanks in advance for any help here.
-Ashley

miwhel · #2 (**permalink**) 10-09-2006, 05:43 PM

Any of the new Intel Core2 Duo chips will give you good editing performance, 2gb RAM is minimum and a good graphics card(top of the range is not needed for video editing), a small HDD for windows and the biggest HDD you can afford for video capture and other assets.

chixwithtrix · #3 (**permalink**) 10-09-2006, 06:05 PM

thanks for your reply. I actually already purchased a computer
(2) Xeon 5130s
Supermicro X7DAE mobo
2 Gigs of Kingston RAM
250G and 400G SATA HDDs
Nvida G-Force something video card
server case

I like it!

GTWCMT · #4 (**permalink**) 10-09-2006, 08:05 PM

Good Choice, I dont think I would have gone for the RAM that you did, if youre dontquite alot of multitasking, You may find that adding another two give would makes things go very smoothly.
I am not sure if that SM Mobo has PCI express either.

I get mine back soon!! 2.9 Terabytes Storage! 2 Xeons, 8 Gig's of RAM, Ahh Bisto.

chixwithtrix · #5 (**permalink**) 10-09-2006, 11:49 PM

The mobo does have PCI express (16X), very nice
I've had the whole setup for about 3 weeks now and it works great, but I am still adding more RAM to it along the way. I bought Adobe Production Studio recently so more RAM is on the backburner

Alan Mills · #6 (**permalink**) 10-10-2006, 01:08 PM

Originally Posted by GTWCMT

2.9 Terabytes Storage! 2 Xeons, 8 Gig's of RAM, Ahh Bisto.

Excuse my ignorance but I thought Windows could only access up to about 4Gb of Ram and that's with tweaking things (or so I thought). What are the other 4 Gig for and how do you access them? Or am I missing something I should know?

GTWCMT · #7 (**permalink**) 10-10-2006, 01:23 PM

If you buy a pro board, It goes by the processors. ( that makes it 4Gig per processor) 64 Bit OS allows for more memory mapping and get rid of te 32 bit resrictions.

Have a look http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderi7525.html 32 Gig's. Yum yum.

You can opt for Window data centre, you do need to get a specialist in for adjust the OS.. Look at this puppy.

4 Dual core Processors and 64 Gig's of RAM
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thundern4250qe.html

Now thats a pro editing system!

chixwithtrix · #8 (**permalink**) 10-11-2006, 12:03 AM

wow, that is incredible!

The Supermicro board I bought can take 32 Gigs of RAM, I can only imagine 64...

GTWCMT · #9 (**permalink**) 10-11-2006, 02:05 AM

I have had one person who wanted that spec system, it was a medical facility that wanted a powerful system enought to do complex modeling.

I down sold to them as the Dual core systems were plenty fast enough. (8x) faster than their current system..

Lets put it this way, Most of the apps (not video) Only need 8-12 Gigs, If you dont shut down you dont need a hard drive as it all can be contained within the RAM system.

For drive performance, RAM Flash harddrives are very quick. there isnt may place that sell them in europe.

Mark W · #10 (**permalink**) 10-11-2006, 09:55 AM

I think you probably are best to always have a hard drive in your system really....

And as for fast flash drives, actually they arent really that fast as currently implimented. Flash is much slower than dram remember.

From: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...129TX1K0000532

"In addition, the two devices will boot approximately 25 percent to 50 percent faster, reading and writing data at 53 Mbytes/s and 23 Mbytes/s, respectively, significantly faster than a typical 4,200-RPM hard drive. But faster magnetic hard drives, such as Seagate's 5,400-RPM Momentus drive, offer burst transfer rates of 57.6 Mbytes/s."