A high-end rig for work....

[Mullet]

Lo peeps,

Well, my works have some coughers kicking about and I've been asked to spec up a machine for my staff to use for video editing/encoding. I have a £4k (exc VAT)....what would you guys recommend? Also, will a 24" screen do or shall I chuck a 30" into the spec?

 

[SwaleSmith]

Lo peeps,

Well, my works have some coughers kicking about and I've been asked to spec up a machine for my staff to use for video editing/encoding. I have a £4k (exc VAT)....what would you guys recommend? Also, will a 24" screen do or shall I chuck a 30" into the spec?

How fun LOL Maybe Core I7 X58 rampage or equivilant 4870 XFIRE or GTX 280 SLI/Tri-SLI (new GTX 295 Coming Soon) some Raptors In Raid if you need HDD Speed.

 

[JN]

Hmm, Tbh I'd prolly go for an i7 setup with 12GB DDR3, four F1 1TB's in RAID0, couple of GTX280's (for some nice GPU-based decoding). Something along those lines. Even then you'd be pushed to 5punk £4k, but I suppose if you throw in a 30" you might come close.

 

[Mullet]

lolZ Jim..... GPU decoding...could I blag that

How about a dual Xeon quad based rig??

 

[JN]

lolZ Jim..... GPU decoding...could I blag that

How about a dual Xeon quad based rig??

Its gotta be worth a shot

I suppose you could go the Xeon route, but I avoided that route because it's not really my forte and I'd rather invest my money in something like the i7 which seems to be grabbing software coders interest more than any SMP setup ever has done.

Of course you could always drop the lot on a Mac if video editing is ya thing....but I didnt say that

 

[Mullet]

Aye..... just specced up a skulltrail based rig with a 1.5GB PNY Nvidia Quadro gfx card, which can encode footage being developed in Adobe's Premiere Pro CS4.....

would also have 2 SAS drives running off a highpoint card in raid 0...

I had discussed my MAC options but our ICT bods will not support it and it will not be connected to the network... kind of rules that option out...

 

[MeltedDuron]

Aye..... just specced up a skulltrail based rig with a 1.5GB PNY Nvidia Quadro gfx card, which can encode footage being developed in Adobe's Premiere Pro CS4.....

would also have 2 SAS drives running off a highpoint card in raid 0...

I had discussed my MAC options but our ICT bods will not support it and it will not be connected to the network... kind of rules that option out...

ya beat me to the SAS http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/300-GB-Seagate-ST3300655SS-Cheetah-15K5-SAS-15000-rpm-16MB-35-ms a few of those would destroy your budget easily mmm SAS goodness :yumyum:

 

[JN]

Sounds like they're a bit scared of the unknown

What drives you think you'll be sticking on that SAS card? Most of the ones that I've seen which are capable of beating a normal SATA drives cost an absolute fortune.

Also, have nVidia actually made the Quadro cards worth their money yet? Last time I checked them out (which was admittedly a while back) they were little more than retail cards with different BIOS's

 

[Mullet]

SAS drives.... looking at the Cheetahs...

How does this spec look:

 

[Rastalovich]

If ur using software that will take advantage of the Quadro cards, ram, I`d not be too critical about the cpu. With the budget, ur best interests will be the displays and the Quadro. The rest just needs to keep them ticking over as well as possible with the monies available.

Some nice redundancy on the drive storage, whether u'd want to have a seperate card for that or rely on the onboard - thinking also about cpu use for the job.

 

[FarFarAway]

I'd get a seperate RAID card for RAID 0+1 or RAID 5.

Personally I think that's a decent enough spec for what you want