Tim, Your route is the one I'd prefer to go (built my last one), but money doesn't grow on trees for me. So I think I'll "settle" for the Medion 2.4G. The funny thing is, when you get a computer that's say 40% faster than your last one, you're thrilled. If you have to go backwards it's a gloomy experience (such as having to work on a 633Celeron at the moment instead of my Ath1800). So when I get my 2.4G I know I'll be thrilled for at least 9 months -- then maybe I can afford the then "old" 3.06G! :)

Purely technical, FWIW - been building stuff for a while and all that...

IF you're not the type to tinker and add this and that, nothing wrong with a pre-built, off the shelf system. You often make some compromises, but you get more for your money then if assembled from scratch. Plus, stuff in the case works together, and any big prob. usually have a cure.

That said, start with a good case - Not mentioned that I could see, but this has a BIG effect on cooling, and if you're rendering video, particularly with variable speed fans for quiet with a P4, you need good cooling, period. Check the overclocking sites for reviews. I can tell you absolutely that you can mod your case to the max, and you may still not equal the cooling from a case designed for good airflow from the start. IT is really science.

Second, as motherboards change weekly: in prices, prob. found, and relative performance to what's out there, research a LOT online for any prospective buys. Checking out the chipset helps, but do not buy a motherboard based just on the chipset.

Third, if dual CPUs wait as discussed in this forum.

Fourth, Memory is cheap, but consider the cost vs benefit of going from 512 to 1 gig - may or may not be worth it to you. With many tasks involving large files, the difference in performance isn't as great as one might expect.

Fifth, Research CPU cooling online, find a few good heatsink/fan combos, and spend a bit more now rather then more later. Personally I have dust prob. so I like the round, cage type heatsinks much more then the alternatives (may loose a little max efficiency, but within a week or three I'm not heating up either).

Sixth, I like ATI graphics cards. Fast, readily available, company's not going anywhere soon, regular driver updates. Matrox IMO (& that of a LOT of gamers) is good -> for flying out a 5th story window! Otherwise, check out the TI-4600 for best value.

Seventh, I'll leave sound alone as I've not found what I consider a really great product at a fair price with good drivers and windows support. I suspect an external firewire box will eventually be the way to go as they get more popular and prices drop a bit. FWIW, I use an Audigy 2, midiman usb box, and an Eurorack, which seems to do what I need.

Eighth, more, relatively smaller hard drives. It's nice to have the latest, biggest drives, but the price per storage sweet spot is just not there - you pay a premium. Smaller drives (80 - 120) give you a lot of options with audio and video, going from one drive to another (& one channel to another) is much faster, and it's pretty easy to add storage at any time as prices come down in the future (USB2 &/or firewire enclosures for the replaced drives - the ones you pul out - are cheap). I mention this with a new system because opting for better/more IDE support now on the motherboard makes a difference - IDE pci cards can be slower, plus take up a valuable slot. And remember, your system HD will limit (or can limit) the speed of another HD installed as a slave on that channel - another reason for a motherboard with 4 channel IDE, as you're much more likely to upgrade the other drives then swap your OS to a newer one.

Ninth, get a more powerful power supply then you think you need - but don't pay too much of a premium. Kind of a juggling act, too little and you can have wierd prob, plus potential prob upgrading if a new drive, graphics or sound card even takes an extra power connection, which is another drain. On the other hand, some of these supplies get expensive, with a price jump of $50 US or more comparred to the next wattage down. So once you figure what will do it, bump it up a little staying somewhere near the price.

Tenth, go with win2k or XP pro - DO NOT use xp home if at all possible - also buy OEM versions - also visit http://www.blackviper.com/index.html to set it up.

Eleventh, USB2 of course... 3.5 floppy (still, as many boot type utilities still demand it, and at $12 US why not)... Backup power (ups) to protect your time and investment?... Ram and chipset coolers optional... Water cooling optional... Custom paint (really) Cool -> maintains your attitude... Case with air filter &/or side window -> ya gotta clean 'em... Hard drive coolers opt.... Silent case - hard drive isolators opt. for sound recording -> same for isolation case... Fan speed control module for same reasons...

Removable HD is one of the reasons I like the Medion. 5 USB2.0 ports. Off the shelf it will allow me to expand harddrive storage any time I like for a couple hundred dollars a pop for a removable USB 80G drive. Usually I can get one project done on an 80 gig drive (sometimes a lot less), but if I'm working on 2 or 3 at once, it's nice to have all those USB ports to add an extra drive or 2.

Wow Mikkie! The Full Monty!

As to all the price structures, I'm starting to realise there aint much difference between Off the shelf and Home grown. PLUS with home grown I'l have to get someone to do it. Off the shelf gets me some added back-up - yeah?

Paul - "Off the shelf it will allow me to expand harddrive storage any time I like for a couple hundred dollars a pop for a removable USB 80G drive. " Never thought about this as an option - only firewire. Removable USBs eh? Any directions to websites welcome. - I can do Plug 'n PLay!!

Grazie

:)

wow...nice long reply there grazie.

Mikkie brought up some excellent points as well. The hard drive issue he mentions and your render time in your example came to mind - Lots of variables when you render out something, in another thread about 'film look' I talked about my render time with VV 4.0c and I have a "slower" system than your Dell it seems but my render time is faster. In my example I said a 5 minute clip averaged about 1 hour = 1 minute and that was using the following filters - Glow, Color Curves, Level and Saturation Adjust and rendering/converting 30i to 24P (motion blur and Deinterlace as well). You said you were getting a "1-minute section started to rack up to 30mins on only a 10% rendered portion" . Wow. So the hard drives figure into this because render time is faster going from one drive to another. So if you can, say, only afford one 120 gig drive maybe opt for 2 80 gigs, or 2 40's and an 80 gig or...well, you get the idea...instead. From what it sounds like you will be doing, at first a few 40 or 60's and an 80 might be fine to start with. I cut a monthly 30 minute show with 2 13's and than I upgraded/added an 30 later. (Than I added a firewire enclosure and put a 60 gig in it. A few weeks ago i got a 120 gig that I still need to put in) (So if you are keeping score I have 3 internal hard drives and one external firewire drive AND one other new 120 gig drive not being used)

I think now that I see what you want to do/will do I can say you need a good monitor that will show graphics well. As it sounds like you might be doing graphics work outside of VV for import into it than you probably should consider a graphics card that works well for graphics programs. Depending on your budget you could check out the Fire GL X1 - but if you aren't going to do a lot of real time graphic work it may be over the top for your needs.

System wise - faster processer is good, but unless it actually will work with the software it may not be as good as more RAM. What I mean is some software is optimized for certian processors and that would fall more on what program you want to do your graphics in. As far as VV goes they recomend a 400 MHZ processor so getting the latest greatest fastest chip may not matter because VV doesn't seem to optimized for one paticular chip. IMO, RAM can speed up overall system response in some cases more than the processor. ..again it depends on what you are doing. Because you will be doing graphics stuff you may have a client who wants to see their new logo and make changes on the fly, most programs use the RAM factor to write stuff too. (I know with After Effects the more ram you have the more preview you can get - faster preview I should say. VV has the same option. )

By "Sound Design" I mean would you be doing, or taking in, projects to do the audio for. Either cutting the effects, doing ADR, Foley, and mixing...or all of the above. It sounds like you will be doing some but that isn't the thrust of what you will be doing. So a basic sound card should be fine as opposed to a specialized card that would output to a DA-88 or ADAT or allow for realtime multi channel output. That is why I asked.

Because you want to network with a non Windows XP system you "need" to go with XP Pro. Home does not allow you to play nice with other versions of windows. This was one of my factors in going with Pro. And yes - http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/supertweaks.htm is one, if not the best, place to tweak your system, although it sounds like you will have someone doing all your tweaks for you.

Nothing wrong with getting an "out of the box" system. My Gateway was an reman, non custom, direct from Gateway. The first thing I asked them was "how many expansion slots?" because I knew what I wanted to put into it over time. Some systems say they allow for upgrades but really only have one PCI slot free, which, to me, doesn't allow room for too much of an upgrade. Overall I would stay away from "shared" - as in onboard graphics, onboard modem, onboard sound, etc. Onboard audio may be fine as long as you can disable it and get another sound card when you want. Onboard graphics always use "shared memory" and IMO are not as good as what you will need because you want to do more graphics and should get a more specialized card.

Tech support in a must. As long as the place/person you buy the system from will work with you it will be a great thing. One of the things I like about Gateway is that they do work with you. You can have them build you whatever you want or you can get a pre-configured system, or they have select remanufactered models - but no matter what the tech support on the box itself is awesome. If you get a "new" system they even have a upgrade/trade back option where 6 months - 1 year if you want to get the "latest, greatest" version of the box you have you can. I feel this is the way to go if you are getting an "out of the box" system...stays within my feelings of always allow for upgrade room.

And all the things mikkie said too...yes yes and yes. :)

>> You DO have to activate XP pro. At least the single release version.

> > ok, let me rephrase what I said - You 'activate' Pro but unlike Home you do not have to reactivate it when you start pulling hardware out and update your system

Now I am confused.... I have XP Pro and all I did was add a new HD and I had to "reactivate" my version of XP Pro. You have to call MS and read off 40+ numbers and then they give you a new 40+ set of numbers to reactivate. The good news is that I did this at 3:00am Saturday morning and someone was on the phone to reactivate me.

TomG

You mentioned you use the Soundblaster Audigy... do you have any issues using the firewire port for DV functions? I am building a new box too oddly enough... and have run out of pci slots.... wondering if the Audigy line's firewire port is compatible with Vegas for video importing/exporting.

I dunno. Really I don't. Before I got any version of XP I read up a lot on it and got that the Pro version did not have to be activated so that is what I went with because I like to tinker. I have not had to re-activate it yet at all.

CLosest I can come right now to explain it would be read here - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/techinfo/deployment/activation/default.asp

Filmy - Thanks for the second detailed report you offered me. - Really, thank you!

Yes, I am rendering from one hd to another.

Some background info for you:

I have 4 external fw drives: 1x60gb; 1x80gb & 2x120gb. I rendered from the 80gb to one of the 120gb drives.

When I started the sample FX test, the render report showed me that 10% had been done AND the time to go was already on 30mins and CLIMBING! This was only on a 1 minute clip. Doing some simple math, this indicated to me that the first 6 seconds [10%] was already producing a 30min to go report. Basic math tells me that the remaining 54 seconds [ 60secs - 6secs ] would take the equiv 4.5 hours! Soooo, 1min of FXed clip - 2 tracks each with 1 fx on each track - would take something in excess of 4.75 hours. That's why I cancelled the rendering. This is also the reason why I'm contemplating a h/w upgrade.

Anyway, update on the original reason I've been contemplating this UG - Blue Screening on PTT - on my, "Guess what? Blue Screening again! . . aaarrgghh!! thread! Read it and think on - or as you say, " Go Figure!"

Best regards,

Grazie

Hi Grazie,
The guy who built my system does it for about the same as PC World, however...he is a video editor - so knows what he is doing - and has got a mobile phone switched on Sundays and evenings. Handy if you need tech' support!
Let me know if you need his addy.
Regards,
Max

PS. About time for another London Vegas group?

Yo Max!

Yup - I'll call you or email Tuesday.

L.V.G. oh yes! Pike Bishop helloooooo .. . .

Grazie

Olive - re the Soundblaster Audigy 2 card - its IEEE-1394 port works fine with demo versions of Vegas and VideoFactory 2, both input and output. Also the card's 1394 port works with Windows Movie Maker but that program has bugs IMO.

I have a Dell 8250 desktop with 2.5 Ghz P4, 512MB RDRAM, 120GB HD with 8 MB cache (room for at least 1 more HD), ATI 9700TX graphics card, two 19" M992 crt monitors, Windows XP Home. I picked the 9700TX card because it is inexpensive, fast, and can drive 2 vga crt monitors (at different resolutions if wanted), or a DVI flat-panel and a crt. The Audigy 2 card has 24 bit capabilty and its 1394 port saves a slot. If you were to buy a Dell for video editting now I'd recommend the 8300 with 3 Ghz P4 and ATI 9800 video card, if you watch the prices about once a month they have a really good deal.

I've run 2 copies of the Vegas 4 demo and the VF2 demo at the same time, along with a few other programs, and had no problems. With Vegas I like that I can undock or "float" the video preview window and drag it to the second monitor and run it at the full 720x480 size. Alternately Vegas lets me preview by outputting 1394 to a camcorder which does digital to analog conversion and drives a TV with composite or S-video. And so far, no crashes or glitches.

I was going to build my own PC but the Dell is about the same cost and probably more reliable.