need advice on PC editing specs

P

Paul_Ekert

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Been sometime since I've spec's up and built my own rig and the market for parts hasn't become any less diverse. I've trawled through various threads on Tom's hardware but much of the stuff I've read is opinion rather than experience so I thought I'd check in here to see whose using what and how that's working for you lot. Hopefully then I can spec something up.

My main areas of use are Light room 4, Photoshop cs6 & Premiere cs6, although I do use blender, iClone and After effects cs5 from time to time.

I'm okay for media drives, case, PSU (probably) and optical drives.

I need; CPU, mainboard, ram (2x8) and a graphics card.

Been thinking of an i5 and asrock combination, but no idea what graphics card to get.

Budget for these items would need to be 400 pounds, but I don't mind buying from computer fares to keep the price down.

Any thoughts suggestions or help would be much appreciated.

Paul
 
im a little bit behind with the time, but i was also looking for a, in my case, laptop to edit video while travelling.

I have an Asus, but thats not important. it has a i5 3317, there are many, many different variants on the 'i' processor series. i have 4gb ram as standard but also added a 4gb corsair pimp daddy uber fast 1600mhz one.

It has a good graphics card, for a laptop anyway a nVidia 740m. pretty standard hard drive and what not.

Ok the reason im waffling about this pretty useless information is to tell you how well it runs, like a DREAM. i run Ps and Lr and Pp and Ae, all CC suites.

photoshop and lightroom dont even bat an eye lid

Ae runs pretty good, as well as can be expected, with RAM preview there is no issues, it buffers out and plays, mabe if i have 5-6 effects on each clip in a given composition then it starts to be problematic

Pp runs so sweet, no need to render, mostly. it uses the GPU and Cuda rendering to keep up, heavy blurs take a bit of CPU and on average it will encode a 20 min video full of effects and stabilization, colour correction and what ever else it needs in about 30mins. i was amazed at this time, my old laptop that i thought was ok took 3 hours.

so dont feel you have to go mental to get some good performance.

For 400 are you needing everything, optical drive, PSU, hard drive etc, case...... or just the basic internals ?
 
Just the basic internals. I have hard drives, case and PSU (possibly need to upgrade though depending on power requirements of new stuff) so it really is the basic guts of the puter that needs upgrading. The board I have at the moment is limited to 4gig ram, which maxes out on ps all the time, and the 4 core CPU is constantly maxed out in ae and often in PS.

How do you find the i5 for multithreasding tasks?
 
If you have 2 different speed RAM modules, they'll run at the slowest speed.
 
Yeah I know, but I don't have enough money for 32gig on this upgrade, so my plan is to get a matched pair of 8gg modules (to give me 16gig to start me off on the new board) and hopefully be able to buy something similar from the same manufacturer in a years time.
 
For the CPU, MOBO, RAM:

http://3xs.scan.co.uk/Category.asp?SystemMasterCategoryID=38

here you still can modify your bundle. But all CPU's will be newish (to save some money you could find some on ebay, with a decent power you could look into "intel i5 760" it's very capable CPU and you can overclock if needed)

For GPU: search for some old cards (still good) like GTX460 1GB maybe?
 
Also you could go AMD route (they do have some powerful CPU for editing). What power supply do you have (as if you need new one it's another £50 as minimum off your budget)
 
Depends if you are doing overclocking.

i5 all the way unless you are doing a lot of video encoding when an i7 will give you 10-20% faster performance.

Decent cooler (overclock dependent) plus decent mobo and latest processor should cost £280-£300. Add memory of your choice.

As to graphics cards, it depends how much use you will make of the GPU. If you are doing basic photo editing, almost any card will do - even the onboard with an i5. If you are going to use PS Premiere Pro and the Mercury playback engine, then you might be better off investing in something reasonable. Budget will dictate, but the first thing to do id understand if you are using the graphics card primarily as a method of getting images on a screen or if the software you use can hardware accelerate compute intensive items through the graphics card. As to memory, if you are driving more than 1 high res monitor, you may want to plump for a 2G card - I run 4 virtual desktops over 3 monitors and already have 900MB of graphics memory used (and I'm not doing a lot at the moment).
 
PS. Unless you are into heavy video encoding (i.e. multiple hours per day) where you can really utilise all 8 cores, avoid AMD. Their cores just don't cut it performance wise at the moment.
 
So if im using my standard RAM that came with the computer, and then added my nice stuff, will the computer just run at the lower speed.

problem is i only have an expansion slot, the other stick is facing the other way and i cant change it without opening the laptop up.
 
saxk said:
So if im using my standard RAM that came with the computer, and then added my nice stuff, will the computer just run at the lower speed.
Click to expand...
Yes.
 
asaspasas6 said:
For the CPU, MOBO, RAM:

http://3xs.scan.co.uk/Category.asp?SystemMasterCategoryID=38

here you still can modify your bundle. But all CPU's will be newish (to save some money you could find some on ebay, with a decent power you could look into "intel i5 760" it's very capable CPU and you can overclock if needed)

For GPU: search for some old cards (still good) like GTX460 1GB maybe?
Click to expand...

Some interesting options there, thank you.

And I may steer clear of AMD for the moment. Never had much luck with their systems.
 
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