Building a New Computer

[Zanzaben]

So I am just starting the fun job of building a new PC from scratch. I am building this primarily to laugh in the face of any thing the video editing software world can throw at me. I use Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium so that is where I will start.

Long story short I want to be able to have Premiere Pro and After Effects open simultaneously on 2 separate monitors both working with uncompressed 1080p avi files with Dynamic Link running between them.

I know a decent amount about computers in general but I know nothing about the details of video editing and how much it taxes a computer to do this. So I have questions like if adobe and the files need to be stored on an SSD or not, if 16 gb of ram is enough or if I need 32, is the GeForce GTX 670 enough to handle it on its own or should I get 2 GPUs, I have absolutely no idea about audio cards.
My budget for all of this is around $4,000, if of course it turns out that to do what I need I only have to spend $2,000 then by all means tell me that setup.
So any suggestions on what I need or places to look where I can figure more of this out would be greatly appreciated.

[Cannonaire]

Having premiere Pro and After effects open at the same time will obviously work better with more ram. Since they are 64-bit now, it would not hurt to go with 32GB, especially if you are working with 1080p files. Speaking of which, you probably will not want to work with uncompressed footage, but rather use a lossless codec like UTVideo. The thing with 1080p video is you can be limited by your hard drive throughput easily, so having it compressed will help with that bottleneck. Having the footage on an SSD will definitely help/remove the throughput bottleneck for reading, but it can be expensive - a full 1080p movie about 2 hours long may take somewhere in the neighborhood of 300GB compressed with UTVideo.

You will want the most powerful CPU you can reasonably afford if you plan to run Premier Pro and After effects at the same time. An i7 or, even better, an Ivy Bridge Xeon with ECC memory would be your best bet. For your video card, I am not exactly sure. I do know that the CS6 suite uses a lot more GPGPU than older versions, but I do not know to what extent it can utilize your GPU. I doubt you will see much benefit in your editing programs from having a second GPU though. Also, just a personal opinion, it is better to get a fast single-GPU card than a couple slower ones, even for games. Higher average FPS does not always mean smoother gaming experience (if that is important to you).

For audio card, it comes down to whether or not you want to do recording. I am not the best source on this and maybe someone else can answer this part.

Lastly, you may also want to look at a capture card. Just something to think about, and up to your discretion.

[Kariudo]

More ram is better here, and I'll second Cannanaire's suggestion for 32GB. ECC, on the other hand, just don't even bother.

I haven't kept up with Adobe CS software, so there is most likely someone better suited to answer this, but this gpu acceleration business is likely overblown. From the brief searching I could do right now, the gpu seems to be of use (in premiere) when you apply *some* effects, use color correction, or resize the preview window while in playback. Not sure if the gpu would help with normal playback or not, and I've no clue if/what AE uses gpu acceleration for. I'd lean towards saying that a GTX 670 is overkill. Again, no clue if what I'm saying is correct here, but I think that vram would be the limiting factor rather than the number of CUDA cores.

An SSD is good for putting the OS and applications on, but it's not great for storing preview files. A RAID0 array of some WD velociraptors is more of what you should be looking at here. Dunno if you'd see any advantage in getting a hardware raid card (if you could find one that's compatible with Win 7, and had SATA III that is...) over just using the built-in raid of whatever mobo you end up getting.

A discrete audio card won't be of any help in editing. It'd be worth it if you had other audio needs, but not for editing alone.

[Mister Hatt]

So I am just starting the fun job of building a new PC from scratch. I am building this primarily to laugh in the face of any thing the video editing software world can throw at me. I use Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium so that is where I will start.
<snip>
My budget for all of this is around $4,000, if of course it turns out that to do what I need I only have to spend $2,000 then by all means tell me that setup.

You do not have the budget for laughing in the face of video editing software.

Long story short I want to be able to have Premiere Pro and After Effects open simultaneously on 2 separate monitors both working with uncompressed 1080p avi files with Dynamic Link running between them.

Uncompressed is a great way to smash your HDD on it when you have plenty of spare CPU time to abuse instead. Might wanna go for some high res monitors at a decent bit-depth if you're working on HD and expect to see it all.

I know a decent amount about computers in general but I know nothing about the details of video editing and how much it taxes a computer to do this. So I have questions like if adobe and the files need to be stored on an SSD or not, if 16 gb of ram is enough or if I need 32, is the GeForce GTX 670 enough to handle it on its own or should I get 2 GPUs, I have absolutely no idea about audio cards.

SSD won't make a difference if your files are too large for them. Your best bet is to get some slightly smaller SSDs and then RAID0 them if you want serious performance. SATA3 will realistically perform as well as this for most uses though, even on NTFS, as well as cost significantly less and come in larger sizes. Also tune them with a filesystem better suited to large files with fast seeks, but I don't recall XFS working in Windows so lol. 32GB is maybe enough for Premiere OR After Effects, certainly not both if you're doing any heavy 1080p lifting. Not sure about GFX cards as I use Quadros but in general, if you rely on CUDA, you want cards with a lot of VRAM and the widest mobo lanes you can get for throughput; I wouldn't worry too much about the number of cores. Audio won't make any difference but in the event you want good audio, get a USB DAC and run that into a proper amplifier rather than using some expensive internal card which still gets interference from being inside your chassis.

I'm not quite sure where Cannonaire pulled that CPU garbage from but you want the most efficient parallel cores you can get, which at the moment comes from Sandy Bridge E5 series Xeons. EVGA make some nice motherboards for this but they cost around $700 and the CPU is around $2000 for just a single one. Contrary to Cannon's post, there are no Ivy Bridge Xeons yet, and ECC makes absolutely no difference for what you're doing. Also, CS6 doesn't use any GPGPU that I'm aware of, it's almost explicitly CUDA. The more cards you have on separate busses though, the more throughput you get, and the more VRAM you can access concurrently. Shit gets expensive though, and doesn't have all that much benefit in the end.

Just worth pointing out, no anime is actually 1080p other than Ghibli films so far, so not sure exactly why you're wanting such high res.

[ZephyrStar]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819116502
Intel Core i7-3770 Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor
$319.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131818
ASUS P8Z77-V DELUXE LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
$279.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231507
G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
$209.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820147135
SAMSUNG 830 Series MZ-7PC256D/AM 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
$281.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136533
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
$119.99
$119.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130769
EVGA SuperClocked 02G-P4-2682-KR GeForce GTX 680 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16
$519.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817139010
CORSAIR Professional Series HX750 (CMPSU-750HX) 750W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready
$144.99


There you go, for $2000, plus you'll need a case, cooling, and CD/DVD/BD drive.

That is the "non-overclockable" Ivy Bridge chip, but trust me, you don't need it/won't miss it.
Definitely get 32gb of ram, and definitely run Windows 7 64 bit.
The video card I selected is overkill. Having more than one of them is not really going to help you much for video editing.
The motherboard supports PCIE 3.0, but my advice would be to buy a slightly older video card in the $200 range.
You can always upgrade later as you'll have the ability with that motherboard.
The SSD is your OS drive, put your OS and programs and games on there.
The two WD HD's are a bit faster, you can raid these for redundant storage, or just have two storage drives.
The 750 watt PSU should be more than enough, unless you put 4 video cards and 8 hard drives in the thing.

[ZephyrStar]

The two WD HD's are a bit faster, you can raid these for redundant storage, or just have two storage drives.

Sorry, that reads wrong. The SSD is the fastest drive, the two HD's are sata 6.0 instead of sata 3.0, so a bit faster than older traditional hard drives.

[Mister Hatt]

Not sure why you're going for such expensive HDDs instead of cheaper ones and using the spare funds on faster RAM. You'd be better off getting a slightly better Sandy Bridge than going for the newer Ivy Bridge chips; IB has no benefit for desktop unless you care about PSU.