For your consideration here's the present state of play:

Processor = Intel® Core™i7-2600k Quad Core (3.40GHz, 8MB Cache) + HD Graphics

MoBo = ASUS® P8Z68-V PRO: USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, NVIDIA® SLI™, ATI® CrossFireX™

RAM = 16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (4 x 4GB KIT)

GPU = 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti - 2 DVI,HDMI,VGA - DX® 11, 3D Vision Ready

Again, TIA,

Grazie

wow grazie, youse gonna be flying!!!

O . . K . . Thanks for the reassurance Leslie, but can you tell, simply, what part of that mix you think will be doing the work and with what outcome? Better Previewing? RAM Renders?

I've read your specs Leslie, what are you achieving and how much "better" would this setup be?

Again, thanks for the reassurance,

Grazie

At this point, the 990x is currently the fastest processor, 3.46 Ghz vs 3.33 Ghz for the 980x. I can comfortably push my 980x to 4.26Ghz at its stock voltage. A 990x can be pushed to about 4.4 Ghz, also at stock voltage. For video editing and encoding using programs like Vegas can that can use all the cores to their full potential, the i7-990x is the probably the best choice. It is really expensive though and the i7-2600x at around $300 gives it a major "run for the money." That said, I really like my 980x and I don't regret for a second the money that I spent on it. Here is a comparison of the 980x, 990x and the 2600k:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-990x-extreme-edition-gulftown,2874.html

i'll bow to jc's comprehensive knowledge on these matters.....

suffice to say i'm basically dealing with sd, hdv, pic files (usually png), audio (wave and mp3), and some client avchd (which plays happily from the tl, but if i need to do anything with it i transcode to mxf). i don't have any problems with playback, but then again i usually have it set to preview auto - i cannot for the life of me see the necessity of spending oodles of cash for full / best playback, just doesn't (in my circumstances) warrant the cost. i know exactly what i'm going to get in the final render, and if i have any doubts, i simply render to new track to see the result (given that this is usually on composited and fx'd tracks with a duration of upto 30secs it takes relatively no time at all).

now, if i had clients sitting in with me drumming their fingers i'd probably opt for jc's system, but i much prefer to spend on the pointy end of production (camera, etc), and decent lunches ;-)

good luck....

There is no "sweet spot". You really must stop all this measurabating, I know from personal experience it can send you blind and deaf. Fortunately the condition is generally only temporary although it can require a long period of convalescence, years in my case.

Here's the thing. Say I want my PC to play out my EX1 footage at Best / Full to my Full HD monitor without dropping frames. It either does that or it doesn't, no sweat spot, more like an "event horizon". My current, quite lowly, quite old rig does that running Win XP, 4GB of RAMand a slow C2Q processor. A bit less CPU grunt and it will fail, anymore is just a waste.

On the other hand if I was running something like Folding At Home there is no event horizon, the problem is currently being worked on by literally 100,000s of PCs and more is always more and better. If I wanted to get the highest possible ranking globally I'd be running racks full of 12 core monsters with water cooling and working 3 jobs to pay the power bills. In this challenge there is however a sweat spot the lowest power consumption per work unit bu that's a quite different perespective.

Personally for my next "video" PC my biggest spend with be on the GPU and like JR I'll go for the nVidia Quadro 4000 and for much the same reason, more GPU grunt helps with vector based graphics and today, with Vegas 10 + Boris and After Effects it helps quite a bit. The other reason for going with the Quadro boards is they support 10 bit output to the monitor. On the other hand for what you do it is probably going to be overkill unless you start using Boris with Vegas or decide to get into AE or..... who knows what will happen with Vegas 11 :)

The best thing I've spent my money on in this game in the past few years was my Asus monitor that I bought a few weeks ago, for $700 it has altered my view of what I do. My measurabiting induced blindness cleared up quite some time ago but now I feel like I've had cataracts removed :)

Bob.

Yeah, Leslie, same here plus I'm a bit of a "What would happen if I did THIS with Vegas?? With THAT plugin??"

My Clients aren't physically over my shoulder, but with the INTERNET and file sharing, YouTube and DropBox they are! . . And kinda expect something "other" than straight cuts and so on.

So, even at your spec you throttle down to Preview quality. Interesting.

Grazie

Arggghh . . > "You really must stop all this measurabating, . . "

It is EXACTLY for this reason that I wanted to blow - BLOW! - all this gumph away and start again with a pragmatic view.

I'm real happy for your latest purchase - mine will be an Canon XF300, and so I want to get VEGAS to fly with that output AND be able to do 4 cammie stuff AND some of my more quirky FX-ing.


No, I want pragmatism, not divert-ism! You know me I can be a real "Prag" at times!!!

Cheers Bob,

Grazie

The i7-2600k will give you 25fps preview/full or best/full (turns out the former is preferable) with several FX applied. I can't see why one would work with preview/auto, given the choice, but with my previous system I didn't have that choice. The 2600K is over-clocking "ready", so I added a bigger cooler but didn't want to involve a plumber for heavy cooling. I think it just depends on how much money you want to spend. My approach was very simple: I selected the processor/cost purse point and built the system around that.

My 980x, even at its stock speed, will play AVCHD files on the timeline smooth as butter, even with layers and effects (up to a point, of course.) However, I spend a LOT of time rendering since most of what I do is long form and that's why I opted for the 980x, it renders much faster than the other options available a few months ago. Time is money.

mine will be an Canon XF300

Gongrats Grazie - I really LOVE mine :)

/Ulf

Oh yes Baby! I'm totally steamed.

Grazie

Grazie, that's a sweet looking rig.
I'm sure the two of you will be very happy together :)

Mike

"It is EXACTLY for this reason that I wanted to blow - BLOW! - all this gumph away and start again with a pragmatic view"

My pragmatic view:

There's not much in any of this. A hard core overclocker will get all excited over getting a 5% improvement on a benchmark.
In the real world that makes bugger all difference. It MAY be enough to just get you what you need or not and that's your problem. You have a specific set of requirements and I doubt any of us here has the tools or the knowledge to tell you what you need to invest in to meet those requirements or even if they CAN be met.

Take a mobo. There really isn't all that much to a mobo, it just glues all the blocks of silicon together. Some have more or less ports, different audio chips and anything from 4 phase to 12 phase power supplies. The latter makes a difference if you're into extreme overclocking and pretty much none if you're not. More ports, great, if you need them. Maybe you get an easier to work with BIOS but how often are you going to futz around in the BIOS.

So, I'm very much of the same mind as Serena, set a budget, spend your money and take your chances. No one here is saying what they bought was an utter lemon and no one here has a current PC that's 10 times faster. What that means is pretty much whatever you buy will either do what you want or not. If it doesn't then buying something different at anything like the same price is very, very, unlikely to get you over the line.

Bob.

agree with bob and serena.....

i looked at the link jc posted above and to be honest for the difference between the top three i'd opt for the cheapest - i mean saving a few seconds on a render is well.... (if it was a matter of 10%> then i might be persuaded, but not for an exponential leap in price ......)

Listen to Bob ... Listen to Bob ... Listen to Bob ...

Put another way, as they said in "Animal House," it just doesn't matter, it just doesn't matter ....

I just posted in another thread that I took the "New Render Test Results" spreadsheet, and was able to predict the render times simply by taking my results and then ratioing each persons' clock speeds to my clock speed, and their number of "threads" to my number of threads. While there is a little more to the performance of a PC, especially in the way the display responds (although, alas, not timeline performance), these two specs get you most of the way there.

If you are looking to get a little more performance out of your current PC, or a new PC, then spend your time fiddling with the software. Get rid of all anti-virus software: that WILL make a difference, especially over time. Learn to tune the Windows settings (such as turning off all the background processes, especially indexing). There are about half a dozen of these, and some of them make a substantial difference. Others, like defrag, are a total waste of time. But, getting rid of all the junk included with many PCs will pay big dividends.

I used to spend a lot of time when setting up a new system getting rid of all background operations, but doing so gives me so little bang for the effort with modern systems that I no longer bother (except for indexing and a few others).

In fact, if I'm working in my Linux browser running in a VMWare virtual machine window in this Win7-64 bit system that I'm now using, it only increases my render time by ONE SECOND (107 to 108 seconds on the 2010 rendertest). With 6 cores @ about 4.2 gHz, a few cycles lost to extraneous tasks seem to have a minimal impact. But that's been the case somewhat for the last several systems I've built . . .

I'm happy with the 970 - it renders just 3 seconds shy of Kkolbo's time with his 980x, which was on water compared to the air in this one. And I don't begrudge the cost.

I had expected the 2600k to perform as well as better, but on another thread (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=766419&Replies=11) im.away kindly posted a time on his 2700k of 128 seconds (119 at temps that might cause slow degradation of the chip).

Bottom line:
990x if you must have excellent rendering speeds and you don't mind spending $$$

980x if you want something pretty close - about $850

970 if you can put up with about 3% slower renders - $450, free shipping (http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Intel-Core-i7-970-3-2-GHz-BX80613I7970-Processor-/320711977689?pt=CPUs&hash=item4aabec6ad9)

2600k if maybe 20% longer renders are OK and you don't need super fast graphics - $290 (and the motherboards may be cheaper too than the X-58 MBs) http://cgi.ebay.com/Intel-Core-I7-2600K-cpu-new-box-/260800957381?pt=CPUs&hash=item3cb8f2cbc5

Personally, I'd wait until the new 22 nm chips arrive later this year. The current chip prices should drop, and the new chips might raise the performance bar without much increasing the overall cost.

Note: Are the fast GPUs really worth it? I use BCC7, but I don't find my $40 nVidia GT240 to be a problem when used with BCC7. I don't get it; maybe a super GPU for animation programs - but for Vegas? And GPU rendering? Maybe faster than Handbrake, but how about the poor-quality result? That's why I still think Sandy Bridge is a great option for most people who don't want to spend a pile of money on a new system. The 2600k/2700k give rendering speeds about 20% better than the old 920-950 systems, but cost only maybe $75 more than a 950; and the 950 requires an X-58 MB for added expense.

Hey Guys and Gals . .

Thanks so much for your input and time you spent on me to explain your reasons. You really don't know how much that means to me.

It's been real busy with my father, for the past 2 weeks, and so on, that I've wanted to get back here and start developing what I need.

John Meyer and John Cline and Bob and Serena and ULf, and LReavis and Mike and Leslie - too kind.

Apologies for my tardiness . . . .

Grazie

I used to spend a lot of time when setting up a new system getting rid of all background operations, but doing so gives me so little bang for the effort with modern systems that I no longer bother (except for indexing and a few others). Yes, I used to go to the "Black Viper" website and do all of his tweaks. I found out that most were useless and some actually counterproductive. However, the few that I listed (anti-virus removal or restriction, and indexing deactivation) do in fact make a big difference. I think you are saying the same thing.

Regarding antivirus software:

Because it had been a long time since I specifically tested for the effects of antivirus software, I turned off my MS Security Essentials real-time protection and tested, rebooted and tested again; then turn it back on, rebooted and tested. Here are the render times using the 2010 rendertest (best rendering quality, audio included):

AV off: 1:47
AV off, after fresh reboot: 1:48
AV on, after fresh reboot: 1:47

Even though one test showed one additional second when AV was off, I don't believe it . . . must have been some kind of quirk.

In any case, I can not see any benefit at all to turning off real-time AV protection - at least when MS Security Essentials is used.

Testing while a system scan is in progress, and VMWare Linux browser is open:
As a final test, I put MS Security Essentials to work doing a system scan while also keeping my VMWare Linux brower (which I am using to write this) during the render. Result:

1:49 seconds.

Conclusion: It appears that an active scan indeed slightly slows rendering speed in Vegas when MS Security essentials is used. Otherwise, there is no detectable effect for real-time protection upon rendering speed.

That's a good test, and I would expect that the impact of anti-virus software is not as severe as it was 4-5 years ago. As I've posted before, I've had computers with Norton/Symantec and also McAfee that took over five minutes to boot, and where simple programs would take over thirty seconds to come up. I removed the anti-virus, and they booted in under thirty seconds, and most programs would come up in 1-2 seconds.

My experience with anti-virus programs is that they tend to get worse over time, meaning that the computer gets slower as the months go by. I am not a conspiracy theory kind of guy, but I actually have suspected at times that this was on purpose because it caused people to go out and buy a new PC. For almost everything outside of media manipulation, a ten-year-old PC is exactly the same performance as a new one. Heck, I still have a PC with Windows 95, and it works great for Excel and Word. It edits DV video just fine. Not so good with web surfing, however.

Also, the settings on anti-virus programs makes a huge difference. If you have it set up to be really aggressive, where it scans just about everything all the time, it can really slow things down. Finally, it is clear that some of these programs are worse than others. The two I mentioned are bad enough that I think a class-action lawsuit might be appropriate. The free Avast software can be configured to be pretty benign (it is the only anti-virus program installed on any of my dozen computers, and it is only installed on the one computer). However, I have all the real-time scanning disabled.

Bottom line: it is never a good idea to have a program running in the background that hooks disk interrupts and can decide, whenever it wants, to halt reads and writes from your drives.

I use Microsoft Security Essentials on all my machines and it has no discernible impact on performance. I recommend it highly.