Having seen what we built at Christmas, my son's friend wants to build his own computer. He wants to do a bit of gaming(Steam) but particularly wants to be able to render videos Budget 450-500 pounds, no monitor required I don't know which CPU is better for rendering AMD or Intel Do you need a lot of ram or would 8gb do? Suggestions welcome
For value for money AMD are better at rendering. However, you need the board to match the CPU, especially when using 8 cores. It would be handy to know what exactly he intends to do with it.. That way the right components can be selected
Hi guys My son says he uses Adobe Premiere Pro Ill ask him for more info latter I was thinking AMD too Amazon have this at 112 pounds AMD FX-Series FX-8120 Black Edition Eight Core Processor Looks like a powerful piece of kit
Not the 8120, it's last gen and pretty poor compared to the newer models. I'll assume that the Adobe Premiere Pro III should be CS3 in which case it's 6 years old and won't use the AMD stuff properly in which case you'll like be better off going for a low-mid range i5 (4430 or above) with any old board and at least 8GB RAM.
FIRST you want a Pro(-sumer) display. If you can't see colour correctly forget it. ASUS PB/PA spec (PB238 is pretty good value now). Only after that, put your money into memory, SSD and an Nvidia card before CPU. A second-hand mid-range Nvidia 500-600 series will do just fine. Adobe needs memory AND STILL rags the drive for IOPS. When you set something to encode whether you're going away for 5 minutes or 10 to make a cup of tea is neither here not there, it's the regular stuttering you have to avoid. I spend a lot of the day in PS CS4 and the single HDD in my system ****s me off no end. My advice: 128GB SSD, 8-16GB of memory (low latency, not fast, or buy fast and run lower clock LL) and $80-100 Nvidia 560/660 will do. The rest will follow. I'd personally go H61+LGA1155 for budget and a 350-450W ~PSU is plenty. If I had the materials I'd definitely test AMD FX versus FM2 versus dual/quad/HTT Intels around $150-$200 to see the relative perf.
The primary problem you've got there is using a single HDD. Whilst using SSDs obviously would be advantageous, common practice is to dedicate 2 decent HDDs solely (ie without the OS or other s/w on them) for source & destination when video editing... ...that way you're not looking at trying to access both the video & whatever random stuff simultaneously which slows the thing down dramatically... & you can also (effectively) eliminate fragmentation. Similarly, i'm not sure why you're saying that Premiere "rags the drive for IOPS" - since the i/os will tend to be highly sequential so, unless things were horrendously fragmented on a HDD or huge no's of separate video elements were being accessed simultaneously, there should be a relatively low level of iops caused by Premiere itself when actually encoding... Again, in your situation, it's the problem that you're using 1 HDD for everything. Then, assuming no additional OP but leaving 15% free space (20% would be a better min but being a bit more generous here), a 128GB SSD will have ~119GB or actual space, so ~101GB of space that it's remotely sensible to have filled at a given time.... ...so i'm not exactly sure where you're envisaging putting both the games & the video that's being encoded & messed with & whatnot, along with the OS & whatever version of CS & things? i just can't see the cost per GB being workable for the OP's son's friend's budget to get a big enough SSD for their needs as a single drive... ...& a 101GB isn't going to be big enough for all & everything. Yeah, don't get me wrong, SSDs are pretty fantastic (i've been using them since 2009 of course) - well, having done a bit of provisional testing with my old 830s (having finally moved the pair of 256GB 830s into a R0 array this week, for audio batch converting) on a 8 threaded FLAC8 compression run they're unsurprisingly testing at well over 4 times the speed of the 15K7 SAS HDD i was using; & they're pretty nippy in the scheme of HDDs. - however, this has a greater simultaneous no of i/os (8x sequential r/ws happening at the same time throughout the entire process) than is ever likely to be there with video editing... ...&, whilst a SSD will be quicker, a proper no of HDDs will be more than sufficient. So yeah, a SSD for the OS & major apps will be highly beneficial, but it's not going to provide a total solution & it'll be much more cost effective to go with HDDs for the additional space rather than SSDs.
The 8320 is £107 Here is my suggestion. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3R5BMCVYNKHAV http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE http://www.amazon.co.uk/EVGA-600W-B...=1389529542&sr=1-3&keywords=evga+power+supply http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...act_title_4?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...act_title_5?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...act_title_6?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1AUCPBF2P18HS http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...act_title_7?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...act_title_8?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3R5BMCVYNKHAV Edit. And a cooler. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-li...rds=cooler+master+hyper+212+evo&condition=new
Andy's build looks good. The only things I would change is the Fractal case to this Cooler Master one and the cooler to the Gelid Tranquillo. The N200 has superior cooling and the Tranquillo will fit facing front to back on AMD sockets where the 212 Evo wont IIRC.
I'm not video editing; I run the program from the HDD as the c:\ SSD in my work laptop is too small to store CS. Just trying to save a 2000px image for web makes the HDD **** itself for 30 seconds no matter where I put the file. This has happened in every PS I've ever owned. Sorry I read it as Creative Suite (the whole thing) not Premiere specifically. My mistake. Is Premiere as poorly coded as PS? Loading filters/saving functions/performing tasks? I don't know. // OK - so go for a 1TB SSHD. At least it has the benefit of both and twice as much space as the 500GB drive above for not much more. Are you using a codec that requires FPU or ALU? Or can it be GPU/QuickSync accelerated? Versus OpenCL on AMD as suggested above?
Ah, so talking at cross purposes - not to worry. There's not a huge advantage to have PS itself on a SSD - it'll load quicker, but that's kind of it, so that's not the reason for your issues... Have you set the SSD to be the primary scratch disk as, after increasing ram (& naturally running the 64bit version so that it can use as much ram as you have), this makes the biggest difference to PS performance? (from a quick search, there's some other tips for optimising performance here, but that's the main one) Then, what version of CS are you using? Simply that whilst i don't heavily use PS, i know that CS4 was dreadful with Premiere... Whereas 5/5.5 & (esp) 6 were/are much better. (i don't like the subscription model so have ignored CC) & otherwise it probably should go without saying, but laptop grade HDDs tend to be on the slow side - saving power & minimising heat & whatnot... Whilst you can get 7200rpm ones (something like the WD Scorpio Black is reasonable), esp if it's an older or lower spec laptop then it's likely to be 5400rpm max... So this 'could' also be a factor in it that wouldn't be seen on a desktop (unless it's only got a green drive). Back to the OP's topic, a single SSHD will not make a measurable difference for video editing vs a single standard HDD... The only ways are to either buy a huge SSD (which would be way over budget) or, as suggested, have dedicated source & destination HHDs as well as an OS drive of some description.
***Just thinking ideas below - it may all be grandmothers & eggs*** You're obviously using the 64 bit version of PS? Simply that, whilst my memory's not great on CS4 now (other than how shonky Premiere suddenly became), certainly CS6 installs both the x86 & x64 versions of PS by default - you have to manually uncheck the x86 version when installing as it'll try to insist that you want it. Then, what's your fragmentation like & is the HDD partitioned at all? Simply that pre Q3 2009 (which would have fitted with CS4) i was only using HDDs - albeit either a single or a pair of short stroked 10K 300GB VRs in R0 for the OS (i had 2 machines even back then), s/w, desktop (which i used to save images i was working on to), but there wasn't this major slow down. So, ignoring the OS (which would have been Vista & then 7 with it) & the overall system spec (which would have probably been lower than yours is now), the 3 differences i can think that could have an effect are - 1. HDD speed - again you're probably using a ~5400rpm HDD - vs either a single or a pair of 10K ones... As said, there are 7200rpm laptop drives now, but as it's a work laptop i guess you're loathe to spend money on it. 2. Fragmentation - for half of ever i've been using Diskeeper which automatically defrags when needed, helping things to run as quickly as possible (PerfectDisk now has similar options, but it didn't at the time). 3. Partitioning - d.t. its effect on 2, i've always highly segregated data either onto alt drives (which you can't do admittedly) &/or by partitioning drives... ...so, for example, the main s/w (i find it easier for knowing what to reinstall) & desktop are, even now, stored on a separate partition from the OS in both machines... Though naturally, now using SSDs, it's only for organisational purposes - not speed. (going back to HDDs, the OS partition size was kept pretty tight so that the s/w & desktop partition weren't right at the end) ...whilst the 'archive data' was on other HDDs & there were a couple of dedicated ones for Premiere. Simply that 'if' you have all & everything on the HDD in a single partition, all of the 'archive data' will be in the faster outer cylinders - leaving new writes to slower inner ones & any defrag s/w will be rearranging all of the data to the faster cylinders unnecessarily. Well, it's not as though you *need* to access your mp3 collection or some such at breakneck speed, so you may benefit from some subdividing of the data on the HDD. Perhaps, if nothing else, trialling a small partition at the faster end of the HDD solely to save pictures to might help to see if this will help any(?). Anyway, as said, just ideas... Well, there's got to be some reason why you're experiencing the issues you are.
