Footage mostly comes from a gopro. We render in Sony AVC/MVC mp4 - internet 1920x1080. As far a effects, thats usually minimal. We render basic videos and really are new to this but our budget isn't really an issue either.

Ok, so what is your current system like?

The fastest render with VP11-13 and Sony AVC/MP4 will be with older AMD HD7950 cards. For MC AVC it will be GTX580 from Nvidia.

What version of Vegas are you using currently?

Trey, nothing renders fast like a fast processor - think intel quad core zeon chipsets. While I often trust and rely on OldSmoke's advice, one thing remains perfectly fuzzy - Vegas Pro and graphics cards.

He's right in what he says, it depends on so may things, but if you have the dineros, spend your money in processing. High clock speed fixes more problems and renders faster than CUDA cores, GPU on/off whatever. They best cheap answer - get the graphics card that each version of SVP was benchmarked with. E.G. SVP 12 was the GTX-570 I think. MUCH, MUCH debate in the forums on GPU.

Right now we are using Vegas 10 but we will upgrade when we build this pc.

[I]nothing renders fast like a fast processor[/I]

A fast processor with the right GPU will always be faster; that is the reason for GPU acceleration in the first place. Xeon processors do have more cores but each core is limited in clock speed and I am almost certain, a 5960X OC to 4.5GHz will beat a 12 core Xeon any time. Also, at this point in time, we have no prove how many cores Vegas can actually make use of.

How does this build look. I took your suggestions and this is what I came up with.

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler
Motherboard: MSI X99S SLI Plus ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Storage: Hitachi Deskstar NAS 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card
Power Supply: EVGA 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply

What about this GPU with the build instead of the HD 7950

SAPPHIRE 100362-3L Radeon R9 290 4GB 512-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 CrossFireX Support Tri-X OC Version (UEFI) Video Card

I agree with what Oldsmoke is saying. The GPU in vegas is often looked at as the thing that does all the speed up. In fact it really should be looked at as more of a math co-processor, or a device that adds the ability to do higher math faster than what the CPU is designed to do.

Vegas looks like it is designed utilized 16 cores, not just the simple render threads under preferences, but in internal prefs there are settings for auto calculating threads for avc decoding maxing at 8 threads for that process alone. More CPU cores would optimize Vegas, but not including the Floating Point power of the GPU would be holding that system back.

The i7-5820 has limited amount of PCIe lanes, 28 versus 40 of the 5930K which is the preferred CPU in this case.
I would also suggest to have 1 systems drive (SSD), 1 storage drive ( HDD, better RAID-1 or 5) and 1x project drive (SSD); all internal drives.
I would also future prove the PSU and go for 1000W or 1200W.
The 7950 is a good card and will still allow for SONY AVC GPU accelerated encoding. You may however consider to use the frame serve to Handbrake method and use a R9 290 or 290X.
Another important point is cooling and I advice to go for a water-cooled system, custom or closed loop like a H100i (2x 120mm fans minimum). The 5930K can be easily and without any fear of degradation be over clocked to 4.3-4.5GHz when water-cooled, that makes for a great system improvement.

Curious...when you say "Project Drive" what do you mean ? WHat would be stored on there ? Just current project files ? Can't that go on the system drive. which I assume would hold the OS and (in my case) SVP13 ?

Right now the PC we have renders a 10 minute HD video in about 20 minutes. We want to knock that down to about a minute.
That's impossible, just impossible. Up to 1-3 times faster than realtime is feasible, but not 10 times faster.

Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
It's an overkill for system drive in Vegas, yet it's good choice. It can be too small for your project size, if you plan to hold sources on SSD you may consider bigger SSD.

Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
Why only 16Gb? It depends on your projects, and you should know how much your projects generally use, but it's possible you need more memory. Simple projects don't need even 8Gb, so it's up to you...

Storage: Hitachi Deskstar NAS 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
I think 2*2Gb drives (in RAID 0) might be better if you use multicam.

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor
Great choice for CPU-only renders and GPU-accelerated playback, but here's the catch you can think of: Hasswell-E has no build-in graphical core. Intel quicksync/GPU can be used for GPU-accelerated rendering in Sony AVC and for GPU-accelerated playback. Not that it's perfect quality-wise, but it's still an option and quicksync acceleration is astonishing.
Unfortunately, there's another catch... Quickest graphical core for desktop now is in i7-5775C (Broadwell), but it's 4-core processor, at 3.3GHz. Generally it does not outperform Hasswell, unless you rely on its GPU. Good part is its 4-level cache combined with video memory, the feature never seen in Hasswell-E and Skylake-S.
Second pretender is i7-6700K, that is again 4-core processor, at 4GHz. It does not outperform Hasswell-E, but is close enough and has GPU core. Also overall price for system will be cheaper on Skylake.

Do you plan to render with perfect quality or ready to sacrifice a bit of quality/size in order to render faster?

Your money will be better spent on the fastest 6-core processor you can find.

You should purchase a GPU to suit your gaming and viewing needs; hardware acceleration for video editing is 95% money-sucking hype and 5% fact..

Just my humble opinion, you understand.

[I] hardware acceleration for video editing is 95% money-sucking hype and 5% fact.[/I]

It saddens me to see a statement like this from someone who is highly regarded in this forum. Can you please provide evidence for your statement? Especially the 5% fact?

I do however agree that a faster 6-core processor is the way to go. As for GPU, AMD cards like to R9 290/390 or their respective X versions have the upper hand over Nvidia cards when it comes to Vegas support. Especially 3rd party plugins like BCC do take full advantage of it.

However, this all depends on what kind of project you usually work with. In my opinion, humble and otherwise, for Full HD1080 60p and up or if you work in 32bit full range, you should look at a system like this:

CPU: 5930K with closed loop water cooler
RAM: 16GB min.
GPU: R9 290/290X
Power Supply: 1000W
Drives: System (OS and Programs) 256GB SSD
Storage: 2x 2GB RAID 0 or bigger
Project files: SSD 256GB or bigger; better 2x 128GB RAID 1 or bigger

A project drive will hold all your media related to the project and should be as fast as possible; especially if you have multi cam projects. Once you are done with your project, you archive/store the project and all its media on your storage drive. Than can be an internal drive, a RAID as suggested or even external drives.

This system will carry you for a while and even do 4K editing as of today; who knows what kind of codecs come at us in the future.

Edit:
As for facts about GPU acceleration, you can find them here. A bit outdated but still facts.

I'm thinking your drive throughput is going to limit you more then you processor specs. In the tests I just did with GoPro footage my C drive was pegged ~95%, my CPU ~60%. I was taking footage from & rendering to my D drive, a 1tb SATA.

That makes sense as Vegas & Windows, by default, use the OS drive for temp files.

You might be better off by trying a separate SSD drive as a temp only drive.

TheHappyFriar
What are your footage bitrate and output bitrate?
Have you got swap file? Was it used? I mean, Vegas is not supposed to write to temporary files during render, if it has to use swap or similar temporary files, it should drop performance dramatically.

1280x720x60 footage straight from my gopro rendered to the Sony AVC 1920 30p internet template referenced above in Vegas 13 trial with & w/o GPU accel on. Windows swap settings are default (fresh install) & Vegas 13 temp settings default.

I don't think Vegas writes the temp files, the codec does. There's some codec's that render straight to the destination & there's some that render a temp file first & then copy to the destination. Sony AVC could be one of those.

That must be what it's doing. Rendering Sony AVC shows the C drive doing most of the writing & D occasionally. Rendering to mpeg-2 doesn't use the OS drive at all but the D drive is writing ~2x faster then the Sony AVC to C.

For folks who already have fast six core processors, net encoding speed gains from upgrading to top-shelf GPUs typically fall into the 0-10% range, which some folks consider a poor return on their investment. Although my evidence is anecdotal, those numbers, at least from x264 aficionados, have been repeated often enough to contribute to an impression that larger GPU gains are more likely to realized on slower or modest systems. The rule of diminishing returns therefore plays a role in determining the best placement of assets when building a new system.

Rule #1 of video encoding is, "Size, quality, speed. Pick two.
Rule #2 is, "Hardware acceleration does not change rule #1.

For folks who already have fast six core processors, net encoding speed gains from upgrading to top-shelf GPUs typically fall into the 0-10% range

Encoding speed is not the focus point for a faster GPU, at least not for me, it's timeline performance at the gain there is in the 50% on above range, even on 6-core systems.

"Encoding speed is not the focus point for a faster GPU, at least not for me, it's timeline performance at the gain there is in the 50% on above range, even on 6-core systems. "

But wait. Up until now you've spoken directly of rendering speed five times, once of plugin support, and not once directly of timeline performance. Which is it?

Up until now you've spoken directly of rendering speed five times, once of plugin support, and not once directly of timeline performance. Which is it?

It can be all of it depending on your source, your target codec and the plugins used in the project. My previous system with the GTX580 had fantastic render times with the correct codec, MC AVC and SONY AVC as both where written for that GPU architecture. With the R9 290, I get much faster render times for MPEG 2 renders like XDCAM or BluRay/DVD. It works extremely well when frame serving to Handbrake. So, no matter where you look, and I speak from personal experience rather then rumors, GPU acceleration is not a hype but a true help when it comes to editing, all aspects of editing and it's benefits are far beyond 5%. Granted, you need the right hardware to get that benefit but isn't as expensive as one would think.

BTW, where are your system specs? You must have an awesome system that you can't fell the difference between GPU on or off.

TheHappyFriar
Great post, thank you.
So, your temporary files setting in Vegas project point to C: In your particular case it might be better pointing to D:. Can you please try it to confirm C: HDD speed is the one to blame ?
I can't get why Sony AVC may need so high HDD throughput though. Result file (with, say, 20M bitrate) is not that much, and Sony AVC should be similar to real-time codec variation they use in cameras.
Mainconcept in 2-pass mode will write to temporary file first, but that's not so big either.

Changed Vegas temp folder to D. No files written to temp folder in D but no write access (well, very little, maybe 50KB/s occasionally) on C during render of Sony AVC & Mpeg-2. Render speeds, AVC ~33-45% longer then Mpeg-2. For AVC CPU usage ~66%, Mpeg-2 ~98%. For disc write speed, AVC between 2-3MB/s, Mpeg-2 between 2-3MB/s.

Maybe it's not 100% disc throughput (both read & rendered to the same drives). I find it strange my CPU though goes ~66% on the AVC & ~98% on the mpeg-2. Rendering AVC to the max default bitrate (~30mb/s vs the default 16) shaved ~15% off the total render time.