Computer Building

[Vampy6997]

Damn enter key...will get to the specs in about 20 min. Sorry


Edited July 29, 2009 by Vampy6997

[Vampy6997]

Intentions: massive amts of video, photo and editing

1) Options for cpu processor (is is ok to sacrifice on this or no?):
-Intel Quad QX9650 ($500)
-Intel Quad Core Extreme ($400)
-Intel Core 2 Duo E4700 ($105--includes heatsink fan)
-Intel Quad Core Extreme QX6850 ($349)

2) Case:
-Antec 900 ($50-150)...I'm pretty set in stone on this

3) Graphics/Video:
-nVidia 9400 ($eh?)
-nVidia 9500 ($74)

4) RAM (or any mem module that fits 240 pin)
-4GB 1066 Mhz DDR2/DDR3...blah blah blah possibly x 2 ($100)

5) DVD
-24x Dual Layer SATA DVD +/-RW Internal ($30)

6) Hard Drive!
-Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ($80)

7) Operating Sys.
-Going with Windows XP Home OEM ($60)

8) Soundcard (just need sound here, nothing superb/fantastic/pimping the pony)
-Creative Labs 7.1 Soundblaster...($9.00)

9) Motherboard
-P45 for Core 2 Quad, etc...($80)

10) CPU heatsink + fan blah blah
-Asus V60 ($50-80)

11) Monitor, keyboard, mouse, speaker(s) (don't care what/who/how)
-($45)

12) Power Supp
-MicroX 500-680 Watt Dual ATX fan (fan?!) PS ($35)->(is this the entire computer's PS?). *confused*

13) Antivirus
-Clueless, anything better than McAfee. I hate McAfee.

14) Cables needed?
-I get that I need a SATA cable...

15) Controllers?
-is a SATA controller typically coming standard with a SATA cable?

16) Good video editing program

Am I missing anything else?
I'd prefer to make/build a comp. I'm guessing roundabout right now the price is ~1066 give/take...all prices listed included shipping costs. Is there anything else that I don't have on here (cables, etc) that I might need?

Anything reasonably priced that would speed up the computer?

Will I need a flash drive for video? =D

What is needed to get an internal wireless modem.

Ok, think that's it...no idea how soon/far off this is, but just want to maybe buy as a go and so on...

Thank you!!

[kvtaco17]

Good list!

The QX6850 should do fine... I have one lol and I edit in hd a lot plus render and cg edit raw images!

4gb of ram is bueno

xp home is a no no... get pro 64 bit edition...

use trend micro or kaspersky for virus protection both are good I prefer trend...

internal wireless modem? Do you want ur desktop to be wireless? if so just get a ubs wireless adapter to work with a router modem combo... usb is better because it can be repositioned vs a internal card... I've been nuilding pc's since I was 8 so if you need help feel free to ask

[Vampy6997]

*Do I need to add any internal modem or just plug in a wireless card and the computer will automatically see it?

*is the SATA power cable something that comes with the power supply typically, and if not, does the power supply have a slot for it to plug in? (or is there a better power supply, or would I need a separate PS?)

Thank you for letting me know about everything else being good

I've done an unbelieeeeevable amount of research over the last 28 hours, learned a heck of a lot and still left wondering.

*Am I missing anything (cables, hardware, software) that won't come standard w/ what I've listed a la carte, that I'd need to buy separately?

*Do I need drivers, or does the hardware typically come with the required cds?

*Good video editing program?

Thanks

[kvtaco17]

if you have wireless already in the house all you need is a wireless adapter to hop on ur network

that PSU I didn't read really well... its a cheapo and I would recommend against it I would spend a little more for something that will be more reliable, last longer and provide consistent power like...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16817153052

and it had SATA power!

cables should be good (remember to order a SATA cable)

drivers come with, but you'll end up updating to the latest for free off of the vendors website

I just Adobe Premiere... its easy enough and gets the job done... and it has some fun advanced features, and won't piss u off

You will need to probably hit up http://www.free-codecs.com/download/K_lite_codec_pack.htm to snag some video codecs for playback because wm player comes with the bare minimal...

otherwise u should be good

[Vampy6997]

I'd venture to guess I do need the sata controller, right?...any idea on a good one? or does that matter too much typically?...

Thanks again I'm taking lots of notes

[chinamon]

honestly, just get a mac.
i do photos and i will never go back to windows.

[kvtaco17]

the motherboard should have sata support so no

[kvtaco17]

honestly, just get a mac.
i do photos and i will never go back to windows.

I have both and they both have their uses

[russianwizard]

Do not get XP 64bit! XP was never meant to be 64bit, Ive had nothing but troubles with it >.< With that much ram and those specs vista x64 will be fine. Also make sure you update to at least service pack 1, or it will crap itself constantly.

Also for video editing get a quad core! You will be glad to only have to wait 10 mins compared to the half an hour it takes to convert videos on a dual core.

Any motherboard that supports quad cores will have built in sata controllers, so don't worry about that. They also come with sata cables as long as it's not an open box deal.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16817341017
Beef up your power supply selection to at least 600watts. OCZ is a solid brand with the only con being the crazy amount of cables that are attached to it.

Also get the drivers from the motherboard website and video card website, the ones on the disks are usually outdated by the time they come out with the board.

Also I'd recommend getting an ASUS sound card since Creative's drivers are crap and they don't care when a new windows os comes out. If you don't want to spend >$20 just use the onboard sound, it's great if you don't use surround sound.

You don't really need to order a separate heatsink since Intel gives you one with any non open box / OEM cpu. Edited July 29, 2009 by russianwizard

[Vampy6997]

I'd prefer PC, and never built a mac/never used a mac...just a bit out of touch with the recent times and new comp stuff, hence the questions...last time I built a computer was back in 2001-2, and those were using windows 98 or 2000 and all the stuff being sprawled out in front of me makes it a bit less of a learning experience than having to purchase everything individually (kinda fun though being able to figure out what to get).

I don't know what I'd do with a mac in the sense that I'm comfortable with windows and all that. really comfortable with it, actually.

Other than video editing, I'd like to be able to play games on it when I'm bored...non-internet games mostly though I might consider getting into WoW.
---

Thank you Kv You've been extremely helpful and I will be sure to ask more q's as I think of them. I think I'm questioned out for now...lol

[ColibriDon]

Well, I'm super tired and don't know a whole lot about building computers, I've built 2 but I just connect, install, and go. I've never had a problem. My current set-up is probably worth about 800-900 bucks for parts, excluding the case. I can run any game I've installed maxed out. Just bragging? Not really, the point is, a lot of people like to buy just one awesome graphics card and think they can run well. Just make sure your parts are all on the same performance level and you'll be fine (Make that performance level high, though )

Do your research on what parts will work for what you want. Go to video editing forums and look at their setups. My rig is purely for gaming so I geeked out on a lot of gaming forums to find what I needed. You'll be amazed how well this will work. Plus, the people there could hook you up with some killer deals online.

One final comment on WoW...don't. It's fun but in its final days, I think (For the hardcore gamer crowd, at least). If you really want to pick up an MMO, wait until September and pick up Aion. I've been in two of their beta tests and it's crazy fun, just as addicting, and a lot prettier.

[delSol_si]

I use mac now and really do not like going back to windows, though I have to every once in awhile (yay for dual boot). Anyway, I personally would suggest sticking with windows xp and only doing 2-3 gb of ram. They are right, xp was never made to run on 64 bits. Unfortunately, from what I understand, 4 gb of ram requires a 64 bit system, which is why you rarely see the two paired together. Personally, I absolutely hate vista, it is just a big piece of shit bloatware. I personally would rather have less ram and run xp. IMO 2-3 gb of ram on xp will be faster than 4 gb on vista because of all of vista's bloatware and bullshit. Either that or I hear windows is coming out with a new operating system, windows 7, might wait and see how that goes.

edit: I can't really remember if the 32 bit system cuts off at 2 or 3 gb of ram, which is why I said 2-3, I just know 4 gb takes a 64 bit system which xp wasn't made to run.

[delSol_si]

Oh, and if you really want to make your computer durable and fast, might try a solid state hard drive, though they are extremely pricey! And please double check everything I am telling you, I don't want you taking my advice and fucking it all up, I am just passing along information that, as far as I know is true, but might not be, I don't guarantee it 100%.

[kvtaco17]

delsol ur correct on the ram thing!

if ur gonna do vista 64bit ultimate is the way to go... but pricey... pm me for an alternative

and its no problem

[Dr. B]

Go 64 vista. You can tone down some of the startup defaults and with 4gb of RAM, you won't have any problems running it.

Go Quad core if you're looking at media editing

don't skimp on the GPU, it's a major choke point in system performance (especially for what you have in mind)

Same goes for the mobo. make sure its a good chipset (I like nvidia) and supports your other hardware

as said, the PSU should be upgraded from what you listed. 600 sounds good, but make sure you get a well-received brand.

The trifecta of performance throttles are processor, GPU, and RAM. unfortunately, all 3 are supported by devices like your mobo and PSU so you cant max out those 3 and skimp on the other 2. The only things that are really independent of your motherboard (performance-wise) are your hard drives, fans, optical drives, sound card, and internet adapters. they only perform slightly better with a superior motherboard.

I like Antec cases to.

I know I said a lot of what's already been said. Good luck

[delSol_si]

Go 64 vista. You can tone down some of the startup defaults and with 4gb of RAM, you won't have any problems running it.

Ya, until you turn it on and it fucks up...sorry B, I usually agree with you, but I firmly believe Vista is a virus and is incurable no matter what.

It is just a reoccurring cycle, think about. Every other OS that microsoft comes out with is shit. First, they come out with a good version, everyone buys it. Next, they come out with a shit version and convince everyone to buy it because it is the best thing ever. After they convince everyone to buy it, they come out and say "oops, that last one did suck, HERE is a new one that doesn't suck" so then everyone is soo pissed with the shitty version they have no problem upgrading. It is just microsoft's little bullshit game to make money. I refuse to play it.

For example: my dad is a computer consultant for a huge forecasting software company. EVERY SINGLE laptop they have is loaded with XP. I asked my dad how they got away with that and he told me "well, big companies, such as this one, can't afford to have their laptops crashing all the time, so we insisted on having our laptops preloaded with XP or else we wouldn't buy them." And, of course since the company buys TONS of laptops, microsoft/laptop company says ok.

Heck, try to build a laptop on Dell.com, last time I checked you had to PAY to downgrade to windows XP. Why would they make you pay? Because they know vista is shit and they are trying to convince everyone to run vista so they can make tons of money when they come out with the new OS that doesn't suck as bad.

But, vampy, do whatever you want, this is YOUR computer, not mine, you gotta build it how you want it. And again, I don't want to be responsible if you load XP and decide you don't like it, so I am just giving you my advice from my past experience.

[Vampy6997]

Thanks everyone again for the useful info

It's a bit to think about, but it's good to have more info than less. I think I have come up with a pretty final list of everything I'll be getting, so this was really helpful, especially with the psu and op sys, etc.

[Dranas]

get something better than an nvidia 9500, im running 2 SLI linked and they arent all that. if you can swing it get at least a GTX 265 check tigerdirect.com and newegg.com they have good deals. I actually run a custom computer bussiness, if you have any questions shoot me a PM and give me the specs of your hardware and ill toss you some ideas.

[Barnaby]

Intel CPU's (unless you did find an OEM somehow) come with a heatsink. Unless you are going to be overclocking, just use the stock ones. They perform extremely well, and are very quiet.

I don't have the time right now to try and spec everything out completely, but I would suggest against that PSU as well.

go to www.jonnyguru.com, and read up on some reviews. Given the specs so far, you really dont' need much beyond a good 600watter, but I cannot stress enough how important a quality PSU is. If you are to spend any extra money, this is where you do it. Clean, quality power above all things, is the most important in your system. Why spend all this money to only harm all your equipment with a cheap PSU.

Don't worry about buying a soundcard if this is not important. Built in will work fine.

AV - If you are going to spend money here, go get Kaspersky AV. This is by far the best AV (while still not being too daunting like NOD32) you can get. If you don't want to pony up any money, AVAST! and AVG both have decent free AV programs.

As far as the OS goes, either Vista 64 bit, or you may want to wait on Windows 7 that should be coming out any day now. If you are going to spend money on an OS, might as well get Window 7. It will be much better than Vista was, we've been running the release candidate here at work, and its VERY solid.

I can't give any recommendations on video editing software, so someone else will have to chime in. Now, video editing software DOES depend alot on hard drive performance. If you have the money, you may want to consider a faster hard drive. Either a Western Digital Raptor, or you could go solid state. In that case the OCZ vertex is a great SSD for the price, and is only bested by the MUCH more expensive Intel X-25m.

Typically I would have that drive be your OS/video editing playground, and then get a cheap slower drive for storage.

[bungiman]

For doing video you want to have a good video card. It will make everything better.

Assuming you compress the video for distribution, you will want a good processor as video compressor is memory heavy. Maybe two in SLI?

I would use Vista 64bit and I probably would do ultimate, I personally would steal it. If you are producing something commercially, buy it.

Additionally I would get about 8GB of ram (not joking). If you think about it you are working with giant files from your hard disk (all SATA), you don't want all of your video to be waiting in pagefiles on your HD you want them in memory (memory is the fastest). You also want to look at memory latency and minimize that.

As far as PSU, it really is up to you. Antec is good. You probably need to look at 550W+.

Motherboard, you want something with a high FSB.

Some things I would look at if I were you:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813131282
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820148304
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136322 <- Fastest consumer lelel HD on market, could be useful for system disk, thats what I use
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814130483
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814130479

Pricey. But if you are really gonna start this you should start it right.

[russianwizard]

You don't need a 10k rpm hard drive. It will only in decrease boot and load times by a few seconds. If you want to go all out and get the best performance / redundancy get 2 identical drives and do a raid 1. (both drives are mirroring each other.) That way if one drive fails you just buy another and your set You will also get a way better performance boost that any 10k rpm drive can offer. (Keep in mind that this is totally optional and it isn't needed for standard home use.)

Also don't go with crucial memory because my friend who owned a quad had 2 sticks die on him, I recommend OCZ, Gskill, Mushkin, Corsair, Patriot or Kingston.

You also don't need a top of the line nvidia or ati card. This will play most games on full settings: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814150337 and it's only $90!

The reason I recommend getting a cheaper card is this. Xmas 2007 I bought the ati 3870 for $230 and a year later it was worth around $60. Spend >$100 on a video card, because the higher ups are only good of you want to play Crysis on super high settings. Edited July 30, 2009 by russianwizard

[RingsMaster]

You don't need a 10k rpm hard drive. It will only in decrease boot and load times by a few seconds. If you want to go all out and get the best performance / redundancy get 2 identical drives and do a raid 1. (both drives are mirroring each other.) That way if one drive fails you just buy another and your set You will also get a way better performance boost that any 10k rpm drive can offer. (Keep in mind that this is totally optional and it isn't needed for standard home use.)

Also don't go with crucial memory because my friend who owned a quad had 2 sticks die on him, I recommend OCZ, Gskill, Mushkin, Corsair, Patriot or Kingston.

You also don't need a top of the line nvidia or ati card. This will play most games on full settings: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814150337 and it's only $90!

The reason I recommend getting a cheaper card is this. Xmas 2007 I bought the ati 3870 for $230 and a year later it was worth around $60. Spend >$100 on a video card, because the higher ups are only good of you want to play Crysis on super high settings.

personally i like to stay on the somewhat new end of the market and tend to buy cards like the 8800gt when it came out and now im looking at the gtx 260 thats a great card and its not over the top expensive

[bungiman]

You don't need a 10k rpm hard drive. It will only in decrease boot and load times by a few seconds. If you want to go all out and get the best performance / redundancy get 2 identical drives and do a raid 1. (both drives are mirroring each other.) That way if one drive fails you just buy another and your set You will also get a way better performance boost that any 10k rpm drive can offer. (Keep in mind that this is totally optional and it isn't needed for standard home use.)

Also don't go with crucial memory because my friend who owned a quad had 2 sticks die on him, I recommend OCZ, Gskill, Mushkin, Corsair, Patriot or Kingston.

You also don't need a top of the line nvidia or ati card. This will play most games on full settings: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814150337 and it's only $90!

The reason I recommend getting a cheaper card is this. Xmas 2007 I bought the ati 3870 for $230 and a year later it was worth around $60. Spend >$100 on a video card, because the higher ups are only good of you want to play Crysis on super high settings.

First of all a 10K hard drive will help with normal operations. If you know how memory works and how your OS uses page files you know that having a 10K hard drive cuts down transfer time like none other. Secondly I agree that raid 1 is good for redundancy and that it would be a good choice for non system disks, however it does not improve performance (imagine if you had to write everything down twice, would you be faster? neither is a computer). If you are working with raw video you can easily hit well over whatever memory your system has, even 8GB, so you are going to have alot of page swaps, you should do your best to improve those transfer times, a 10K will do that.

Keep in mind this is not typical home use, we are talking about serious video editing, which brings up your choice in video card.

nVidia makes better video card chipsets, period. Both there core clocks and memory clocks beat ATI's. The beautiful thing about nVidia is that there are almost daily driver updates (I am not exaggerating) AND there drivers are open source so that you aren't limited to Windows. I won't deny that you can use ATI video cards with Linux/Mac, but you are looking a unsupported features and degradation in performance because ATI doesn't make the driver public.

As far as memory, I've never had issues with Crucial. Sucks for your friend. However I would stay FAR away from Gskill, Mushkin, and Patriot. They are relatively new and are lower quality IMHO.

Of course hardware goes down in price as time goes on. But if you are setting up a video editing computer/studio, don't be cheap. You don't want your system to lock up on you while you render 30 seconds of video to see if everything is right. And you certainly don't want to wait an afternoon for your 30minute clip to render.

Sorry to come on strong but you sound like you don't fully know what you are talking about. I will be completely upfront about my credentials. I am a Computer Engineer graduated from Georgia Tech.

[russianwizard]

lol I've used gskill for 4 years now and had nothing but troubles, even with extensive overclocking.

While nvidia has the superior chipsets, A teacher of mine had a serious video editing rig (quad core, lot of ram etc.) and he had an 8600gs and he was able to render video as quick as the dell machine at my school with dual top of the nvidia workstation cards. ATI drivers are great in windows, and shes not going to be using Linux or mac so it's not that big of a deal if ati lacks support for those 2 oses. All in all you don't need a $300 video card to render video, it's more of a cpu job. Yes the video card helps, but It isn't worth the giant price increase.

I am too qualified in the field of IT, I have my A+ and Net+. Not as good as a degree, but I am about to head into college. So don't judge me too quick buddy.