Thread: Not entirely budget concerned machine

Been asked by a friend who is working freelance in video after leaving a post-production company to see if I can design a machine that is better than an off the shelf HP machine that they used at work. I don't have massive experience in this but after looking through the forums a bit and talking to a few people, feel something like this would make sense and be a good starting point. Any suggestions or advice would be reallt grateful for!

Fractal Design Define XL Black Pearl

Intel® Core™ i7 2600K 3.40GHz Socket LGA1155

Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3P Intel Z68

EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD Superclocked 1280MB GDDR5

Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz

Adata S510S3 SATA III 2.5" 60GB SSD

Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB 64MB Cache Hard Drive SATA 6Gb/s 12ms 5900rpm

Seagate Barracuda 500GB 16MB Cache Hard Drive SATA 6GB/s 8.5ms 7200rpm

Corsair CX 600W V2 ATX2.2 80 PLUS

Corsair H60 Liquid Cooler

LG BH10LS38 10x Blu-Ray Rewriter

Icy Box 3.5" Card Reader with Multiport

60GB will leave him crying get a 128, Some software suites take up GB of storage.

I don't understand the Seagate drives...You can buy 2 Samsung Spinpoint F1s which are 1TB each, 7200rpm which is what you want for video, and they are £35 each. I'd suggest looking at those.

Is the "GeForce GTX 570 " On the list of graphics cards supported by the mercury playback engine? The MPE allows a faster editing work-flow.

Water-cooling, Is it really needed? I'd double check the reasoning behind it.

Bump the ram to 12Gb, After Effects will eat 8GB all on it's own, You need to reserve some for the OS and premier.

He only wants to run premier, after affects and photoshop on there and keep it clean of everything else so that was my only thinking behind the 60GB but if you think he will need a 128 will look into it.

Seagate was just what looked good at the time, ultimately I think he wants to look at using RAID for the obvious reasons so if those Samsung 1TB are only £35 each that's fantastic, thanks.

Again he asked for water cooling, I can see the advantages but have also put in a spec for just fan cooling which I feel is just as effective.

will look into the graphics card, the motherboard more compatible with some cards more than others?

Lastly he's talking about even wanting 32GB of ram, can't see the harm in having that much or is it just overkill

Thanks for the help, really useful.

He's nuts...What's he going to be doing with 32GB of ram? His CPU can't trudge through that much effectively!

Get him to invest in CUDA cards!