I like the AMD's. Used to like Intel. Then AMD became way way cheaper, and I switched. That's not really the case anymore.

Spot recomended some good specifics. I'll add alittle.

Video card- ATI 9600 (any version). They're relatively cheap ($50-70), and have the latest DirectX/ OGL support (except for the very latest next-gen cards).

I like to skimp on the case. :) For my AMD I bought a P-4 case, put an extra fan in it & it's good (cost was $14 after rebate, including shipping!).

Remember, AMD came out with 64-bit for the desktop first. Intel plans to make one now, and will be using AMD's specs. So, tha rubbish about AMD not being utilitized in Windows will be reversed (it hold true on versions of windows that came out years ago (95/98) but that's it).

You might NOT even want to get a duel processor. Now that V5 supports network render, you could build a "Cheap" machine for editing (a comp ~ $500), and render in a screamer (which you don't need a large/duel monitor for). :)

Hope that helps!

Keep in mind that processor speed is not everything. Hard Disc access time is very important and you need try get better than the 7600ms standard. Consider a second dedicated SCSI HD just for video editing use.

The more memory on the video card the better, and of course at least 1GB of RAM - 2GB is better.

Not long ago, I put together another new machine using the Gigabyte 8KNXP motherboard, a 3.2Ghz P4 (Northwood core,) intel 875P chipset with an 800mhz FSB running 2 gig of DDR400 premium Corsair RAM. The 8KNXP had two IDE controllers that will control up to 8 drives. I put a 30 gig drive as my system drive and hung 3 Western Digital 200JB drives on the other three channels. The other IDE controller can be set up for hardware Raid, so I put four of the new 250 gig Hitachi drives on it and set them up for RAID-0, this gives me one screaming fast drive that is 1 terrabyte in size. According to SiSoft Sandra 2004, it can sustain transfer rates of just over 100 megabytes per second. The Western Digital drives clock in at about 50 megabytes/sec. The 8KNXP also has 4 SATA connectors on it, two of which support single drives and the other two will support a two drive RAID. I don't have any drives on those yet.

The 8KNXP has three TI-chipset Firewire ports, 8 USB 2.0 ports, an Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller and a decent sounding 5.1 soundcard with S/PDIF digital I/O. Besdies the graphics card, there is nothing plugged into any of the PCI slots, everything else I need to edit video is already contained on the motherboard.

I got an Nvidia dual-monitor 8x AGP graphics card hooked up to a pair of 21" Viewsonic P810 monitors. All of this is powered by an Antec 550 watt "True Power" power supply and resides in an Antec "Solution Series" case with 11 drive bays.

All things considered, the computer (less the 21" CRT monitors and hard drives, which I alread had) didn't cost altogether that much. to build. I believe the case, power supply, motherboard, RAM and processor was right at $1,000. Vegas only starts to slow down when I have a bunch of layers or effects, if I am doing relatively simple stuff with simple transitions and a few layers of titles, it runs at a constant 29.97 fps. Also, MPEG2 encoding is faster than real-time. I couldn't be happier and it is very stable.

I have a number of other machines, including an Athlon 3200+ system, but none of them can touch the new system in terms of raw horsepower. I guess my point is that you can currently build a screamer system for not an outrageous amount of money. Heck, I paid over $10,000 in 1987 for a Compaq 386/16 with 4 meg of RAM and a 100 MEGABYTE hard drive (that was almost always full.) The funny thing is today, I have over 1.6 terabytes of storage in this one machine and it's almost always full, too.

John

> ...would the current 32 bit Intel processor be adequate for video editing?

I think it is safe to say that the current 32 bit Intel processor is MORE THAN adequate for video editing. I too built a system around the Gigabyte 8KNXP motherboard, a 3.0Ghz P4 (Northwood core) Intel 875P chipset with an 800mhz FSB running 1 gig of DDR400 Kingston HyperX RAM (CAS 2) and used two physical hard drives one IDE 200GB drive partitioned for OS on C: Apps on D: and Media (e.g., loops, MP3’s. etc.) on E: and a second SATA 200GB drive for capture and render. I’m considering buying a second SATA drive to use as RAID-0 to expand the original capture drive because I’m rendering to the same drive as the source which makes I/O my bottleneck right now.

I prefer Intel too and I looked at the benchmarks between the P4 3.2 and the AMD 64 and there just wasn’t enough of a difference to prove consistently to me that it matters. Perhaps once we have 64 bit operating systems but not now. My current system just screams and I’m very happy with it. The whole thing cost me around $1800 when you include the graphics card, DVD writer, etc .

Edited later: Sorry, error on my part. I actually have two 160GB drives NOT two 200GB drives. (I was looking at the wrong configuration when I posted and I opted for the 160's in the end because they were cheaper per GB at the time)

~jr

I, too, built a machine aroung the 8KNXP. With P4 3.0 - 800 FSB, 1 GB Mushkin Hi-Perf RAM, ATI 9600XT, and four 7200 RPM ATA drives, it is reliable and fast. One thing that improved performance noticably is having a separate drive for the temp folder location - that way, it doesn't compete with the system or video drives. I took an old 40 GB drive, used an ATA to serial ATA converter from caloptic (www.caloptic.com), and put the temp drive on the serial ATA bus.

I built a dual processor machine and I don't recommend it. I had too many troubles with drivers and software working well. That was about two years ago and it may have changed...your mileage may vary.

We tried to put together the fastest NLE machine we could for under $1,000. Then we wrote an article about it and put it on our website. It's now a couple of months old so I'm sure you can either do it cheaper or faster.

http://www.videoguys.com/DIY.html

In the article we list all the components we considered and why we chose the ones we did.

Gary
Videoguys.com

Thanks very much for these replies, they are most helpful. With regard to the hard drives, my retailer has Seagate 7200 rpm Barracudda IDE drives or Seagate Serial ATA 7200 rpm drives. A friend has told me that the serial hard drives are quite new and are experiencing more problems than the IDE drives. Which of these drives, serial or IDE, do you think would be most appropriate for video editing?

The epinions article I found on Intel vs AMD can be seen at:

http://www.epinions.com/content_2200871044

Regards, Fred

I can’t speak for any problems with SATA drives but SATA has a slightly higher bandwidth rating (150MB/sec) and SATA drives are not serialized on the same channel like an IDE drive. This means if you place two IDE drives on the same channel/cable you can only read and/or write to one of them at a time, i.e., operations are serialized. SATA doesn’t have this limitation.

So SATA drives are “architecturally” better for video editing. Whether the technology is as reliable or not remains to be seen.

~jr

Concerning Videoguys machine:
On this mobo (Asus P4C800-E Deluxe ), is the FireWire port OHCI ?
And the RAID option (ata133) is it useable with ata100 hard drives?

Yes, the Firewire port on the P4C800 is OHCI compatible. However, I'm not sure if it uses the Texas Instruments Firewire chip, this one is generally regarded to be the "most" compatible. I went to the Asus website and they dont' say whose chipset they're using. If it were a TI chipset, I assume they would have used that as a selling point.

An ATA133 controller will support all drives up to and including ATA133 drives.

On another matter, the Seagate Setial ATA drives don't perform particularly well. Go to www.storagereview.com and see what they say.

John

Hi all,

We at ProMax are putting together 3 different configurations in a good, better and best solution. With in the next week we will have them available on our web-site and as always you can call 1 of our systems specialist to discuss your needs.

Regards,

Dan Hatch
www.promax.com
800-977-6629