Building a nice video editing machine - suggestions?

[ingeborgdot]

If you were going to build a machine that would be a nice machine for doing some AVCHD video editing what would you suggest? This is kind of a survey I guess as to what would you put in it? Budget is around $2000

 

[EDO219]

Personally, I would go with an i7 950 for the CPU and one GTX 570 as the graphics card. Multicard solutions for video editing can be troublesome, in my experience. Also, ATI drivers have frustrated me so many more times than most Nvidia drivers have.

HDDs ... $2000 really wouldn't allow room for any SSDs unless you used a very small one for the OS and video editing programs. For mass storage you might want to go with a few 7,200 rpm drives with at least a 32 MB cache, although a 64 MB cache would be ideal. The black versions of WD drives hold my respect. Perhaps this would be a good time to go for a redundant RAID 1 setup.

RAM ... tri-channel DDR3, of course, but I am honestly not sure how much you'll need currently or a few years from now. A good brand of 6 GB (2 GB x 3) or 12 GB (4 GB x 3) should work nicely.

 

[ingeborgdot]

Thanks for the reply. Is there any type of special setup a person should do to make video editing the fastest possible?

 

[gwailo247]

You many want to do see if the programs you are planning on using support the six core chips. AMD's chip is about 300 bucks, a lot cheaper than Intel's 1000, and I've read some articles/benchmarks in which they report greatly decreased project times due to the six cores.

If you look around some forums dedicated to video editing, you may see what they have to say if getting a six core chip is worth it.