New PC build for editing, opinions and comments ?

[soulgolem]

I'm building a new PC for using video editing softwares with because my old one is getting tired. I'd like to know what people think of that configuration. I plan on using this computer with the latest versions of After Effects and Premiere, i'm also beginning to learn Cinema 4D.

ASUS Sabertooth Z97 MARK2

Corsair Vengeance 1866 DDR3 RAM (4x8gig)

Barracuda 2TB (x2)

Intel Core i7-4790k Haswell Quad Core 4.0Ghz

EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Dual 3GB w/ EVGA ACX Cooler

Cooler Master HAF 932 Case.

Power Supply ? Dunno what's good and durable here, care to help me what to choose ?

Those things combined are pretty much maxing out my budget so i'm open to changing something for something else if it's worth it and not twice the price of it.

Thanks !!

[Kerry56]

Seasonic and most Corsair power supplies should be good.

No SSD for your operating system?

[jman98]

Be sure you buy a UPS for your PC. A lot of people cheap out and skip that. I can tell you from hard personal experience that it's not worth it to skip out on it to save money. I live in a place with regular brown outs (came home yesterday to find another one had happened) and I had more unfixable hard disk corruption than I'd care to admit to or talk about when I ran my computers without a UPS. I've used CyberPower but there are other good companies as well.

I'm not a big fan of Asus as I think their designs suck (if you use a 3rd party heatsink you may find that it blocks access to a slot or two on the motherboard - I'm not saying you will for sure, but I've seen it happen) and I had some problems a couple of years with Asus where I went through two I couldn't get to work and finally switched to Gigabyte and had no problems. But it's a bit of Seagate vs. Western Digital thing between Asus and Gigabyte where each one has their supporters and detractors who swear that the one is good and the other is 100% crap.

[redwudz]

I would definitely recommend three or more hard drives. SSDs are great for boot, just not enough room for storage. They have also really dropped in price. I like a small boot, and a couple of large storage/working drives. My present PC uses a 120GB SSD, then three 1.5TB WD HDDs. I quit using Seagate drives after several consecutive failures. WD has worked much better.

32GB RAM seems a bit excessive, but probably good if you are doing a lot graphics editing with Photoshop. Of course, I also assume you are using a 64bit OS. 32bit OS's can only use 4GB.

For power supplies, a lot of decent ones out there. 750W should be more than sufficient.

I'm also a big fan of water cooling and use a couple of Corsair coolers. They are much quieter, very small and very efficient than any air cooler out there, IMO. And the price isn't much more that a aftermarket air cooler.

[MaverickTse]

Since you are approaching your budget limit, I'd suggest:
1> Downgrade the video card to GTX750, I think anything above is an overkill
2> 16GB RAM will be more than enough. Actually 8GB is already sufficient. (a 64bit-application can use 4GB memory at most.)
3> Use the spared money to setup a RAID5 (or RAID0 if you don't mind the risk). I/O of gigantic files is going to neck performance on HDD, but doing editing on SSD is not a good idea, so RAID is an option (use hardware RAID if possible)

[Cornucopia]

(Ugh, here we go again). For TB+ level drives, particularly likely with higher bitrate HD video, a RAID5 (or 6) is a BAD idea. Incredibly long downtime plus a growing likelihood of ruining a remaining drive, thus rendering the whole setup wasted. Read my past posts on this. If you need to use RAID, use RAID 10 (aka 1+0, or 0+1). Either in 4 or 8 drive configuration (depending on how large a throughput you need).

If you are doing Compositing (AE) and/or 3D Animation/Rendering (Cinema 4D), as you say you are, then 32GB RAM is not excessive at all, in fact is right on the money.

Scott

[hello_hello]

I'd highly recommend RAID hard drives (at least two drives if possible) for moving large files around. Given you're already planning on two of them, run them as a RAID-0 configuration.

Things may have changed over the years, but MB's with RAID ability tend to only support a few RAID modes. In my opinion, RAID-0 is fine for "home use" (no fault tolerance). There's been 3 PCs here running RAID-0 volumes for years. One of them died a couple of years ago (the MB failed) but the other two are still going strong, although I upgraded the drives in one to 1TB models a while ago. When I built the PCs originally, they comprised a total of 12 hard drives running as 6 x RAID-0 volumes (2 drives per volume). A mixture of WD, Seagate and Samsung drives. Two of the Samsung drives failed within days (faulty model) and were replaced.

Yes, hard drives can fail, although if they survive the first couple of months they'll generally run for years, and if there's two drives running as a single RAID volume, the chances of the volume failing are higher than if it was a single drive, but hard drives are pretty reliable. I just follow the "single hard drive" rule and back everything up. If a RAID-0 volume fails it's no more a hassle than if it was a single hard drive.

I've been meaning to build a new PC for a few years. I almost made it to the computer shop a week or so ago. This week hopefully....
I had a SSD drive on the shopping list, removed it, added it again, removed it..... I'm not sure how much benefit I'd gain. I don't care about boot time. Even if I booted every morning I'm sure it'd complete while I make a coffee, but I don't. Mostly, the PC would run 24/7.
I guess I could always put a SSD in this PC instead, which will be mostly used as a media player. Faster booting there might be more fun.

[PuzZLeR]

Good suggestions here, but let me comment, and further reiterate on the SSD drives. This alone is a huge speed advantage in every way on top of everything else - for editing, encoding, playback, better capture reliability, etc, the list goes on and on.

Yes, they are more expensive per unit storage than the "regular" HDDs. But, all that means is that you will have less storage on your PC. Big deal.

But "less is more" in this case. You are not using them for storage, you are using them for performance. You really should keep your computer clean, lean and mean anyway. Bigger hard drives on your PC really is margin for more clutter on it - stuff that you should be storing, archiving and backing up externally.

You only really need a couple of SSDs, just for your computer. You can go ahead and use the less expensive ones for your external storage.

[MaverickTse]

Good suggestions here, but let me comment, and further reiterate on the SSD drives. This alone is a huge speed advantage in every way on top of everything else - for editing, encoding, playback, better capture reliability, etc, the list goes on and on.

You are editing and encoding on an SSD !?
I can't afford to do so. I'd only use SSD for the system drive(C: drive)

[sophisticles]

If you are on a budget and don't do any serious gaming, then skip the discrete graphics card for the time being. Since you're just starting out with some of the software, by the time you get to the point where CUDA will be of use to you the mid and top range Maxwell based cards will be out.

As for storage, I disagree with some of the other posters, an SSD is great for boot up and shut down, and it's also cuts down on the launch time of an app and it helps if you're working with high bit rate formats like lossless, ProRes, RAW as you input or your output but if you're working with formats like that you need lots of storage space and large SSDs cost a lot of money.

I work with ProRes, Raw, Huffy, Lag, AVC lossless, FFV1, and I can tell you that source and output files are huge, for even short clips.

Consider a Hybrid drive as your boot drive and some RAID 1+0 or maybe 2 Velociraptors from Western Digital.

[Cornucopia]

@sophistocles, I think you misunderstood. I completely agree with you, re: SSDs. Great for boot/OS drive (though I would use a raid 1). My RAID suggestions were mainly for media storage.

A dedicated video card will certainly benefit you when encoding, 3d rendering & other previews, working with stereoscopic material.

Scott