Computer Advice Needed: What Should I Buy?

[Rallycat]

I've been reading the guides, actually understanding some of them and am about to buy a new computer to start, er, attempt to make my first Anime Music Video! (My ever faithful but elderly Dell laptop just won't cut it anymore) Any advice would be very very much appreciated.

Here's what I was thinking of buying:

Dell Intel Pentium 4 w/ Hyper Threading Technology (Um, what is hyper threading technology? It sounds nifty and somewhat familiar)

Dimension 8400

Pentium® 4 Processor 630 with HT Technology (3GHz, 800 FSB)

Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition

1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz

320GB Performance RAID 0 (2 x 160GB SATA HDDs w/ Native Command Queuing) or
250GB Data Security RAID 1 (2 x 250GB SATA HDDs) or
500GB Performance RAID 0 (2 x 250GB SATA HDDs) (From what I've read on the forums here, RAID seems to be the way to go...but what does RAID 1 or RAID 0 mean?)

CD or DVD drive? Standard is a single Drive: 48X CD-ROM Drive. Do I need more? I can upgrade.

Videocard: 128MB PCI Express™ x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out) ATI Radeon™ X300 SE or do I go with a 256MB PCI Express™ x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out) nVidia GeForce 6800?

In addition, I will be purchasing Adobe Premiere. I already own one of the later editions of Adobe Photoshop. My understanding is that a Capture card is not necessary, because the captures are not as good quality as the straight .vob files. Right? Maybe?

Is there anything critical I'm missing? (no worries, I'll be getting a monitor too!) Anything on the list posted above that would inhibit my ability to make music videos?

Again, thanks for any advice!

[trythil]

Dell Intel Pentium 4 w/ Hyper Threading Technology (Um, what is hyper threading technology? It sounds nifty and somewhat familiar)

All it means is that multiple threads of execution can run simultaneously, as opposed to the almost-simultaneous execution that you usually get with almost every other processor.

320GB Performance RAID 0 (2 x 160GB SATA HDDs w/ Native Command Queuing) or
250GB Data Security RAID 1 (2 x 250GB SATA HDDs) or
500GB Performance RAID 0 (2 x 250GB SATA HDDs) (From what I've read on the forums here, RAID seems to be the way to go...but what does RAID 1 or RAID 0 mean?)

RAID 0 is essentially worthless, and is really just used by geeks who think they know what they're doing to prove that their dick is bigger than their peer. All you're doing with a RAID setup is distributing different pieces (called stripes) of files to different drives in the RAID, which really gives you no benefit over just buying one drive.

RAID 1 gives you some basic redundancy by mirroring the data on one drive on another

CD or DVD drive? Standard is a single Drive: 48X CD-ROM Drive. Do I need more? I can upgrade.

A DVD drive is required if you want to rip DVDs.

Is there anything critical I'm missing? (no worries, I'll be getting a monitor too!) Anything on the list posted above that would inhibit my ability to make music videos?

I'd say a Pentium 4 is a major inhibition, but that's just me You'll probably get acceptable performance on it for encoding tasks.

Also:

http://www.amvwiki.org/index.php/Category:Hardware
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/

[trythil]

Typos:

All you're doing with a RAID 0 setup is distributing different pieces (called stripes) of files to different drives in the RAID, which really gives you no benefit over just buying one drive.

RAID 1 gives you some basic redundancy by mirroring the data on one drive on another.

[dwchang]

Dell Intel Pentium 4 w/ Hyper Threading Technology (Um, what is hyper threading technology? It sounds nifty and somewhat familiar)

Hyper threading is "virtual multi-processing" with *up to* a 10 - 20% increase in performance, but also a *possible* degradation in performance based on all the extra flops used.

To get overly technical, basically there are cycles in particular stages in the processor pipeline that may not be in use and thus the scheduler schedules some executions in there. I also believe there are multiple execution units and thus there is *some* parallelism of instruction execution.

In reality, hyperthreading is just a buzzword and in reality you want true-multiprocessing with two indepedent cores. Hyperthreading is nice in theory, but is just a stepping stone to multi-processing.

If money is not a problem, I suggest the newly shipped dualcore products from AMD and Intel. If you have even more money, a dual dualcore AMD Opteron (that'd be 4 processor cores total).

[dwchang]

Also hyperthreading obviously only works on multi-threaded programs. This is becoming more and more prevalent, but certainly not in every program.

Then again, another instance where it is useful is cache misses and those happen in any program. Given cache misses suck so a 5% gain there isn't gonna buy you much in reality .

[FurryCurry]

IMO, video encoding is one of the few areas where a P4 WILL hold it's own against Athlons, despite being slower in other areas.

Agreed that RAID is pretty much useless for anything amv related. I'd far prefer a couple completely independent disks to a RAID setup. RAID 1 will halve your capacity and slow down writes, 0 greatly increases the risk of losing everything if there's a problem with even a single drive, for no significant speed increase.


I'd say the three most inportant things for an editing oriented machine would be:

Disk space: You just can't have too much.

RAM: 1 gig seems about right. 2 might be better, but you probably won't gain much in speed.

Processor speed: Important, but less so than having plenty of HD space, or at least a gig of RAM. You'll be hurting a lot more if you don't have that last 10 gigs of drive space to finish your project, than you will if it takes an extra half hour for something to render.

I'd also suggest getting a multi-format DVD burner. You've got to have a DVD drive to rip footage with anyway, and you'll need some sort of burner to back data up, might as well step up and get a DVD +/- RW.

[trythil]

\
If money is not a problem, I suggest the newly shipped dualcore products from AMD and Intel. If you have even more money, a dual dualcore AMD Opteron (that'd be 4 processor cores total).

There are manufacturers that are shipping products based on dual-core CPUs already?

[dwchang]

\
If money is not a problem, I suggest the newly shipped dualcore products from AMD and Intel. If you have even more money, a dual dualcore AMD Opteron (that'd be 4 processor cores total).

There are manufacturers that are shipping products based on dual-core CPUs already?

I'm lazy, but I'm pretty sure since Dell is the preferred customer of Intel, they already have the processors and are supposed to sell them already.

Also I HP, IBM and Sun have the dualcore Opterons already and HP is already selling them.

[Rallycat]

This is very helpful. Thanks so much! I had no idea about the dualcores. They look very nice...and very expensive. Will have to see if I can get one on my budget. Whatever I get, it'll be a lot better than what I have now!

[bum]

The vast magoirty of programs suport only a single core. Unless your video editor supports dual cores, then its a waste of money.