Please critique this computer set up for using Vegas

cowmumble wrote on 2/11/2002, 12:46 PM

Hi people,

I'm buying a custom made computer for best utilizing Vegas 3 and hoping you'll tell me where i may run into problems with this kind of setup or if everything looks good. I havn't made the purchase yet, but wanna get it this week:

Raid Set up:
WINDOWS XP HOME EDITION
Motherboard = ASUS PT4-E
Processor = INTEL P4 1.8GHz (478pin) w/FAN
Memory = PC 800MHz 256MB RAMBUS RDRAM
ADAPTEC 29160 ULTRA160 PCI SCSI kit
2 18GB 10KRPM SCSI HARD DRIVES (OEM)(I'd get more gb but SCSI is pricy!)
CD Writer = PLEXTOR CDRW 24X10X40 IDE (OR) TDK IDE 24x10x32
DVD-ROM = SONY DVD ROM 16X IDE (OEM)
Video Card = ATI 8500 Radeon 64m DDR

for Video Capture:
Sony DVMC-DA2 Media Converter with a 3 FIREWIRE 1394 PORTS PCI CARD.

I Already have a good Soundcard so I just need to know about Windows XP compatability, driver issues, capture, conflicts, etc...

any help or feedback would be great!

Comments

Cheesehole wrote on 2/11/2002, 1:05 PM

1. the scsi drives are pricey and may not even be worth it in your setup. unless you have money to burn, consider a cheaper alternative like ATA100 drives. use one drive for your system/apps and a separate physical drive for your audio/video data.

you won't see a major difference with SCSI unless you are using a RAID setup or lots of drives. 2 18GB scsi drives vs. 2 100GB ATA100 drives are going to be very similar in performance, but one is much smaller and more expensive (the SCSI!).

if you need support for external drives, Firewire should do the trick. you can hot-swap them, and they are less expensive than SCSI. for a DV setup, they are a good match.

2. i just removed the ATI Radeon 8500 from my system after a month of problems/buggy drivers/system freezes. i wanted it for dual monitors + 3dsmax acceleration + games and it seemed like the perfect solution. i was running win2k and i'm now convinced that i will not be happy with any dual solution under win2k unless it's two SEPARATE display cards. (win2k desktop management is a nightmare with a single-adapter dual-monitor solution like the Radeon 8500 or Matrox/NVidia's solutions)

i've been running with a GeForce2 AGP and an old Matrox Mill 2 with great success. i love it! i never realized how much i loved it until i spent a month with that ATI card in my system. now i get to try to get a refund!

you might have better results under WinXP. it was the system freezes that finally made me switch back to my two-card solution. the drivers/Hydravision software were a joke. maybe when they finish this product it will be cool.

cowmumble wrote on 2/11/2002, 3:50 PM

Thanks for the feedback for a newbie, I will be using both Windows XP and a RAID setup. If indeed RAID, will I still see a major difference with SCSI over the ATI 100 Drives?

also, I heard both good and bad reviews with the ATI 8500 Radeon Card on this forum. I don't intend on using Dual monitors and I'm not a gamer, I just need the performance of a good card.

Since I am using Windows XP over Windows 2000, am I still likely to see the same kinds of issues with this card that you mentioned?

The place I'm buying my computer from has these cards listed below and I can pick any one of them: (Price is no concern on the Video card, I just want one I can grow with)

ASUS V7100 PRO GeFORCE2 MX-400 32MB SDR
ASUS V7100 PRO GeFORCE2 MX-400 32MB SDR W/TV OUT
ASUS V7700TI/TITANIUM PURE 32MB AGP4X GeFORCE2/DDR MEMORY W/GAMES
ASUS V7700TI/TITANIUM PURE 64MB AGP4X GeFORCE2/DDR MEMORY W/GAMES
ASUS V7700TI/TITANIUM DELUXE 64MB AGP4X GeFORCE2/DDR MEMORY/3D GLASS/GAMES
ATI XPERT 8M
ATI XPERT 2000 32M
ATI RADEON VE 32M
ATI RADEON 7200 64M
ATI RADEON 750064 DDR
ATI RADEON 850064 DDR
ATI ALL IN WONDER PRO 32M
ATI ALL IN WONDER (pci)
MATROX G450 DUAL HEAD 32M
MATROX G500 DUAL HEAD 32M
MSI 835 GeForce2 MX 400 32M
MSI 836 GeForce2 GTS 64M DDR

As I mentioned earlyer, I will be doing my capturing with a Sony media converter & Firewire, so with that in mind are any of these cards overkill for me, and is 64m going to be a better way to go than 32m, or is that even an issue? sorry for all the questions, but video is new to me.

thanks for your help!

wvg wrote on 2/11/2002, 4:07 PM

I agree with cheesehole. SCSI drives price/performance wise simply don't cut it. And if you're into serious video editing "only" a pair of 18 GB drives won't either. You would indeed be better off getting good quality 100GB drives. ASUS makes outstanding quality motherboards. I assume the quality is the same for their video cards. So does Maxtor. If you're a purist as far a purity of color, some people feel nobody beats how a Maxtor video card displays graphics. Maxtor may not have the fastest cards, however unless you are into serios game playing don't really matter.

Cheesehole wrote on 2/12/2002, 12:29 AM

SCSI:
the Adaptec card you specified is not a RAID SCSI adapter. if you are talking about running software RAID then that doesn't count. if you want to reap the benefits of SCSI, you'll need a lot more hardware (hard drives/expensive controller) than you're talking about here. why not sink the 'SCSI' money into a faster processor? or more ATA100 drives? those things will make much more of a difference unless you are going to be running LOTS and LOTS of tracks at once and you're ready to sink at least 2K into your storage solution. for most of us, the major bottleneck when using Vegas doing normal audio/video editing is the CPU. put your money where it counts. :D (my next system will be dual Athalon XP2000+ woohoo!)

DISPLAY:
WinXP is supposed to be able to handle the 'one-chip-two-displays' solution like Radeon 8500 or Matrox dual-head (i believe wvg was referring to Matrox not Maxtor). but since you aren't running dual monitors, personally i think you're best off with a Geforce2. NVidia's drivers are easy to manage and remarkably solid and the Geforce2's are cheap as hell. One of the Matrox cards would be my second choice. you won't get any performance benefits from the ATI Radeon 8500 if you aren't into games. you only need 32MB. 64 won't help you a bit for Vegas.

JoeD wrote on 2/12/2002, 4:22 PM

U160 scsi drives "don't cut it"?
uh - yeah (eyes crossed)

The better route is a hybrid system - fastest U160 scsi and fast IDE 7200 drives.
But U160 with highest rpm is WAY MORE than capable. It also is much snappier than any IDE available now.

They make larger U160 scsi drives. I think WVG is saying he can't afford them. They aren't cheap.

BTW: not ALL asus boards are top notch. I could rattle off many poor asus board modles.
No, you want to research the CHIPSET (and then research all problems with that chipset. Anandtech is a great place to stat there)...not the mobo makers name as WVG states.

JoeD

bw wrote on 2/12/2002, 5:37 PM

I reckon that more important than hardware is the OS install setup. I know that the ACPI manager is supposed to handle IRQ conflicts but with seven or more on say IRQ11 it gets too much. Since I loaded W2K as a 'Standard PC HAL' Everything works much better, complicated transitions preview smoothly, the audio is glitch free and I can capture all day to a 40gig 5400 RPM ATA100 with never a dropped frame. I am using an AGP G ForceII and a PCI of the same card.(Works great)

jcreem wrote on 2/14/2002, 11:24 PM

Note. I've got the ATI Radeon 8500 DV with Windows XP. Had it for about
2 months.. I've had zero OS lockups and zero VV crashes. The Firewire ports work great. It is a nice card. Probably not the absolute best in the world for analog
capture (I really only use the digital capture)..But I will say the analog
capture is much much better than the older ATI All In Wonder Pro card I had
years back.

Using standard drivers on CD that came with product (There have been
beta drivers around but I stay away from those these days).. In addition there
is a new non-beta driver that addresses some "games" performance issues..

rmack350 wrote on 2/16/2002, 1:33 AM

I'd agree with others that the scsi drives aren't the top priority. Fast IDE should be fine and if you like you can cheaply build an IDE array later. Make sure you use one drive for system and the other for data. Also, I'd suggest a full tower case so you can expand it later with removable drive cartridges. You would also do just fine with DDR-DIMMS-get a gig. Finally, I don't think the P4s will ever support Dual CPUs. You could consider the dual Athlon route.

We have a Matrox G450 running on win2k at work (but not with Vegas Video). It was hell for a while but the current driver will spread the image across two screens without all the popups apearing in the center space between. It works just fine. And if you ever have two monitors you'll never go back.

Finally, you ought to be thinking about an external NTSC monitor and some sort of massive tape backup system. The backups are especially important if you do a lot of work that reuses old footage. Save your masters, use the backups.

And that's another product for sonic to think about: a backup system that can manage projects and media. Mezzo does it for the Media 100 and it's a lifesaver.

Rob

Riktar wrote on 2/16/2002, 7:04 AM

I have to agree with the rest in the sense that SCSI is overkill. With the current level of IDE Harddrives out you would do just fine with a pair of Maxtor's setup in the following manor:

IDE1 Master: Maxtor (Or whatever) system drive in the 40 - 60 Gig range
Slave : DVD ROM drive
IDE2 Master: Maxtor (Or whatever) video capture in 100 gig and up range.
Slave : CD-R/CD-RW drive

The only caveat with the above setup might come in with the ROM drives. Some models like being the master and react poorly to the slave position. You may want to check with the manufacturer or check out other hardware forums for potential setup problems with the model you choose.
The Harddrive arrangement works best when both are on seperated between the primary and secondary controllers in your system. From my experience this holds VERY true if you are going to try any analog capturing with your setup. DV capture is nowhere near as taxing on your system, but could pose a problem with dropouts if you will be doing long (30 minute plus) captures.

As for your memory, 256megs is not going to cut it in XP. Windows 2000 might be ok with that amount. Remember that XP is a incredibly resource hungry OS. I am using W2k and I find 512 megs of system memory is adequate. Sometimes I wish I had more. But until I upgrade (shudder) to XP this amount will do ok. If it was me I wouldn't consider anything less than 512 megs of memory for that OS. More if you can afford it. If it came down to a choice, I would save the money on SCSI, go for the IDE HD's and pour the savings into memory.

While you didn't mention a brand of soundcard, I will hazard a guess that it isn't made by Creative Labs. They are very hungry when it comes to PCI bus bandwidth. For video capture I would prefer The Santa Cruz sound card. While this is not exactly a top-end Soundboard, it does a nice job. Low system needs and good sound.

You also didn't mention if Vegas Video 3 is going to be the sole use of the machine. It sounds like you are going to have multiple roles for this unit with NLE being the primary choice? If you are going to do some gaming the Radeon will suit your needs fine. If you are not going to be gaming, I would go for a Matrox product. The 2D is the best you are going to find for the money, especially if you are going to be sitting in front of that screen for a few hours. And trust me, if you are looking to do some video editing, you will find yourself sitting for longer periods than you can imagine. I can't count how many times I have said "just a few more minutes" and when the few "minutes" had passed, I looked at the clock and shook my head that 3 (or more) hours had passed. Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if I had a video card that caused more eyestrain. But my trusty G400 is just too easy on my eyes.

Last but not least, try and find posts for components that are exactly like the ones you proposed. And I am talking right down to the brand name and model. While the current state of hardware is getting better at inter-brand compatibility, you still have to be careful how many cooks are stirring your pot.

This may sound like a lot of research to do, but from my experience, time spent on research is a miniscule fraction of time spent on debugging problems once the system is built.