[quote name='Arakias']Some rendering, post production work of footage from DSLR. Nothing too intensive I guess as the work is still hypothetical. I suppose I mostly need a new machine at this point at the sub $1000 budget (or less). I'll be using Premiere for the work and I just saw this site
http://www.videoguys.com/Guide/E/Vi...iting/0x4aebb06ba071d2b6a2cd784ce243a6c6.aspx and they recommend the i7 also as well as other cards and more RAM also. I'll see what I can extend my budget to but yeah, I guess they dont require the SSD so maybe that will save some cost.
CPU cooler and fans are negligible costs that I wasnt worried about but just wondered if necessary.[/QUOTE]
First of all, I don't trust anything from a website that looks like my dad would build and color... Seriously? Brown? And the layout just screams 2002.
Second, I don't trust them because they are using sub-par acer monitors for color critical applications such as video editing... It's all fine for non-pro video work, but if you tout yourself as professional, even if you are giving advice to non-pro's, having a quality 8bit or 10bit color depth panel is just as important as having a fast CPU for rendering. They don't even touch on the subject or give advice on what monitors to look at, just size wise.
Third, recommending nvidia quadro for video work (even pro-level) because of it's "better" OpenGL support is a load of crap. And you get the same level of CUDA power on a consumer level GPU. What you are paying for with quadro (and a lot more I might add) is the double precision floating point calculations (128/64bit vs 16bit on geforce), not CUDA or OpenGL/CL. And you don't even need it for video editing unless you use some CGI in your videos. A lot of video guys are dumb when it comes to this stuff and just reiterate of what nvidia people tell them or other dumb video pros tell them.
Lastly, AMD video cards are way faster for OpenCL apps and the only one that uses it for video work as far as I know is Sony Vegas Pro 11. Adobe has been saying they are going to support OpenCL in premiere pro for the last 2 years, but I gave up and went back to nvidia for CUDA. They didn't add it in 5.5 and won't likely add support till 6... if that. I have no faith in Adobe at this point. I'm probably going to switch to Sony Vegas Pro in the near future if their gpu hardware acceleration is as good as people have said. I just hope that SLI/xfire support gets added; that'll make my triple 570's worth it.
You also don't need high end GTX 470/570's for video editing. You do want CUDA for CS5/5.5 for support, which basically means all geforce cards. They make NO mention other than Mercury playback engine support for gpu hardware acceleration, but they completely omit any notions that Premier Pro does offer other gpu acceleration support on a number of their filters for post processing as well as encoding support (Although, Adobe doesn't exactly spell this out easily on their website either; have to go to their forums for this information and how to use it properly).
So for about $1000 without case and PSU, here's what I've come up with.
I forgot if you need an OS or not, so I just budgeted one in there just in case. You can omit if you don't need one.
I kept with the i5 2500k since its still a very power chip with a lot of overclocking potential. Paired it with a cheap CM 212+ cooler and the nice Asrock ext3 gen3 board, and you're pretty much golden for a while. If you get a beefier cpu cooler and a more powerful PSU, you can crank that cpu to 4.8-5ghz and be completely stable. The Asrock board has all the essentials that you need or want in the price range, plus it supports ivy bridge, pcie 3.0 cards and one of the cheapest, most featured z68 chipset around. If you have no need for a heavy OC, SLI or pcie 3.0 support, then you can go with cheaper z68 boards or even p67's, closer to the $90 mark that will still be perfect for this build.
I again say go with as much ram as you can since its cheap right now. I picked the G.Skill 16gb (4x4gb) set since its the cheapest 1.5v cas9 timing right now; this can change daily. Corsair had a killer deal not long ago for their 16gb vengeance set for $67; same specs (was a newgg shellshocker deal, didn't last).
As for your budget, I still included an SSD; although its an entry level SATAIII OCZ agility 3 120gb, but its nonetheless a very speedy SSD. The biggest down side with it is that it uses Async NAND's, which will have a slower performance in in-compressible files like encoded video or processed pictures, but you'll still hit 200+MB/sec speeds on both reads and writes, while other files will hit close to 500MB/sec. Just keep your OS, one or two games and Adobe apps on there, while you use the rest of the space as a scratch disk. I added a 7200 1TB drive for secondary storage, but you can easily go with a larger 2tb 5400/5900 green drive. Just have to be careful if you are reading AND writing from the same disk as that will drop your rendering performance.
I went a bit high end with the GPU--the nice EVGA GTX 560ti 448 model. Now it is a limited edition card so you'll have a hard time finding a 2nd one if you were looking to do SLI down the road. But for a single card solution, its very fast. It's actually a GTX 570 chip that has a fewer steam processors and 1 less SM, but runs nearly as fast for $80 less (1-3 frames slower in most games). Plus with its beefier core, its CUDA potential is a nice added bonus for apps that can take advantage of it. You can go cheaper with a $220 560ti or the vanilla $180 560, but I wouldn't bother with a 550ti.
