Any help or suggestions on a new build for photo/video editing? 1. CPU – Intel Core i7 – 2600K £240 2. MOTHERBOARD – Asus Maximus IV GeneZ £145 MSI P67A-GD53 (B3) £105 3. SSD – Crucial M4 128 GB 2.5” - £165 4. RAM – 8GB 1600Mhz DDR3 - £60 5. GRAPHICS - Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 1GB £130 6. PSU - Antec TruePower New 650W £90 7. CASE Fractal Design Define R3 £80 8. BLUERAY LG are best I’ve been told 9. CPU Cooler - Be Quiet! Dark Rock Advanced £40 Budget: £1200 Main uses of intended build: Photo / Video editing with Adobe products Parts required: case, mobo, psu, graphics card, ssd, ram 8gb, blueray, cpu Previous build information (list details of parts): It’s 7 years old, Pentium P4 3.2, so leaving that alone. Monitor resolution: Already have a 24inch HP , with a second smaller monitor for extra space. Storage requirements: SSD should be 120 or 128 GB, I already have a couple of large hard drives. will you be overclocking: No Any motherboard requirements (no. of USB, Xfire/SLI, fan headers): I need a good selection of features without going over the top. I prefer Intel i7 Extra information about desired system: I will be operating Windows 7 64 bit. Not into playing games so no over the top cooling requirements or overclocking. Needs to be a stable solid Pentium system.
What you listed looks tip top! Although add a Samsung F3 HDD for storage. Also you might need some 2.5" HDD screws for the SSD as my Fractal came with none! That HP an IPS monitor? Going IPS would be a great direction for Photo and Video editing.
If you're doing video editing, I would dump the SSD, double the RAM and get at least three separate hard drives. You'll get a lot more performance by not reading and writing to the same drive.
Dump SSD? No way. If you should dump something, it's the GTX 460... (or has the GPU-acceleration finally actually made it to Photoshop?) Saved money could be used for more ram. But yeah looks like a very solid build overall.
+1 to what Blogins says - if the HP isn't an IPS monitor, sell it on and set aside some of your budget to get a 24" (or greater) IPS monitor like the Dell U2410 (£400ish) or even a NEC multisync (£600ish). No point spending all that money on a photo editing PC if your display is below par.
No chance would I dump the SSD with that budget, the M4 is good choice. He can add as many HDD's as he likes for storage afterwards, if he finds he needs more space with the two he has already. And why does he need to double the ram when hes already got 8GB? That will do him fine as it is, I actually video edit on a regular basis and my ram usage in Windows task manager never goes above 4gb and thats with loads of pdf's, google chrome tabs, skype and corel vid studio open. Also, the 2600k is a great choice if your rendering video's often, it will render them about 30% quicker than the 2500k because your vid editing software will likely be multithreaded (ie can use all 8 threads).
Depending on the price of the LG writer (something like the BH10LS30 would be ~£60), there 'should' be enough money in the budget to get 2 fast HDDs as well as the SSD. Simply that, whilst i really do agree that ideally the memory could do with being doubled as well, you can get away with a dedicated source & destination disk (as the 2 HDDs - rather than also having a dedicated scratch disk) & i'd argue that you'd gain more from loading things like Premiere, Photoshop & After Effects (plus all the plugins) from a SSD than you would from the gain in memory. Another alternative 'might' be open if the OP works out how much space they actually needed for the OS & main software that they use - simply that 'if' this doesn't exceed ~42/45GB (minus a bit of wiggle room) they 'could' look at a 60/64GB SSD instead, & the spare cash could double the memory... Okay the SSD won't be as fast as a 120/128GB one but it's about trying to stay within budget. Oh, & i really don't like the M4... ...even the C300 comes out better overall as an OS drive (& i didn't like that particularly d.t. it's poor GC).
Why do you suggest 16gb ram? That's way overkill imho. Bittech doesn't even suggest it for their 2K premium player. If hes using video editing software it wont go anywhere near that. Yes its fairly cheap but surely he can add another 8gb down the road, as its not necessary now
Adding extra memory is never guaranteed to work at the stated settings... ...if you believe there's the need then it's always advisable to buy a single larger kit imho... [Edit] Oh, & of course memory is particularly cheap atm - there's no knowing when it will go back up in cost again... [End Edit] ...& there's 2 major uses for the extra memory with the OP's intended usage - for multitasking with, for example, different bits of Adobe concurrently (now that there's x64 versions) &/or with large no's of resource heavy plugins without limiting things/relying too heavily on the pagefile... ...&/or to create a scratch disk in ram which can vastly speed up the workflow vs either a HDD or nand based SSD. Yeah, 'if' the stated usage had been to game & use t'internet & editing small amount of mobile phone footage (or infrequent larger files with minimal rendering needed) then i'd agree that 8GB would probably be the better call (unless there was some other need for extra memory of course - another reason for a ram disk or for drive caching or...(?))... ...however the OP's explicitly stated that the purpose for the build is image & video editing which suggests it's far beyond that. Of course, for an extra ~£60 then he/she could get both the memory & a larger SSD, but it was about sticking within budget... ...well he/she could also add another ~£30-35 & get a vastly superior intel 510 or V3 instead of the M4/C300 (& an extra ~£20 on & you're at the V3 max iops which improves still further)... ...add an extra ~£30 & you've got the p8p67 deluxe as the usb3 front box thing 'could' be very useful for archiving (& imho it's a better board than the Maximus IV with it's foolish, unless you're gaming & using several gfx cards, NF200 chips)... ...add an extra ~£39 & you've got the 3rd 1TB F3 that padrejones suggested... ...add another ~£100 for an Asus sound card thing to improve the clarity of audio when editing... ...etc, etc...
