Best Linuc PC for the Price?

[The Sumerian]

Hi,

My film group works with a MacPro for serious and higher budget projects, but we want to have a secondary unit that's for HDV only. We're going to use Ubuntu Studio and KDenlive for this. We've tested them out and think they'll be great for lower budget projects. Can anyone suggest our most affordable solution for computing? We need something that can handle HDV at a reasonable pace.

[Dv8ted2]

Reasonable is a subjective word. We can't answer your question properly until you give a price range of what you are willing to spend.

[The Sumerian]

Let's say I just want a good machine to start off with that I can buy the bits and pieces to later. So can I get a machine that'll handle HDV around $200? I'd get the RAM, speakers, monitor external hard drive etc later. Essentially can I get a bare bones machine with the ability to upgrade to HDV's requirements at a later point and spend somewhere between $200-$250 on the bare bones?

[disturbed1]

$250 is cutting it close if that includes the price of the CPU. You can safely rule out Intel i7 and ddr3.

You don't have your location filled out, so here's with USD.

Get a decent Motherboard, Asus and Gigabyte seem to be popular. I own both brands, and would personally lean more towards Asus. The P35 and P45 chipsets are solid performers, and can be had for a good price. ~$100

Start with at least 2gig DDR2. Ram is cheap these days, and 2 gigs would run you ~$25

Most of the cases you purchase that have a built in power supplies, are cheap. You can get a case without PSU for ~$40
Name brand PSU ~$50

You'll want a GPU with VDAPU acceleration for HD playback. Any nVidia 8xxx+ will work. The 9400's do well with 1080P content ~$50

Editing effeciently requires fast hard drives. Ideally a dual raid set up would be best. Finicianally, it is out of the question for most people. Start with 2 drives, and build from there. ~$50x2=$100

Lastly, the CPU. With HD content, the more horse power the better. Keep in mind, not all applications are mutlithreaded, and those that are may not scale all the way to using 4 cores. If your final target does not take full of advantage of 4 cores, you'd be better off with a higher clocked dual core CPU. If you plan on using x264 - get a quad core. x264 scales well and will use all 4 cores.
A fast dual core or lower clocked quad core CPU will run you ~$160.

Grand total for a mid/low range editing system - ~$525.

You can lower the cost by using one hard drive (-$50), Grab a G31 based motherboard (-$50) and use a slower CPU (-$100) to build a low end editing station for ~$325. Try not to cheap out with too many components. RAM, motherboard, and PSU are the most important factors for building a stable system. Until you've used a cheap motherboard (ECS) crappy RAM (generic) and POS PSU (anything that comes with the case) you'll know what I'm talking about

I've tried to edit SD content on a PDC 2140 (1.6x2) and a Celeron 1400 (2.0x2) each with a single hard drive, and dual hard drives. It's a night and day difference between those systems and my e8400 (3.0x2).

On top of the above, you'll have to add in the cost of a Monitor ($100) Keyboard/mouse ($20), and decent speakers ($50), that alone is $170.