Hardware Upgrade Recommendation ?

[sam123]

Hi, new user here!

I been researching different hardware to start learning and well doing some short 1-15 min short commercials-films. I will provide my hardware currently below. For the moment, Im so interested to get the dell xps laptop as I heard good things. However due to budgets, and well, want to start learning, I will stick to my pc desktop. So I bought this dell desktop from canadacomouters for like 200$. not bad but obviouslt not enough ram and gig and and well, graphics card. I know I can build my own if I really research and find what I need, some would cost maybe around 800$ for a good i7 intel with gforce graphics 4 gig ram. now as i said im learning but in same time I want to produce content I also will be using adobe after effects templates to apply to my videos and I wanted your recommendation on what should I do or maybe I will just wait and save for my dell xos )

im looking for something now. I was thinking of buying 4gig ram and a graphics card only to upgrafe my current system. It will make it total 8gig ram with say a 2 gig ram video card andpron upgrade harddrive.

Its prob going to cost around 300$ canadian.

Do you have any opinions on my deicision or scratch the 200$ computer and just spend more on a bult? Im trying to utilise my resources and my budget. So maybe I can get a helping hand ?

Cheers

- intel core duo cpu 2.33ghz
- 64bit windows 10
- 4 gig ram
- windows 7 home premium sp1
- 500GIG

[redwudz]

A lot of ways to go about this.

4GB RAM is a bit small for a 64bit OS. 8GB would help. The CPU being a somewhat slow dual core may be limiting,
depending on what codecs you use. H.264 can use all cores in my system and that greatly speeds encodes.
But for other codecs like MPEG, maybe not so much of a bottleneck. I would also use a SSD of maybe 250GB.
And several large HDDs of more than 1TB each.

I don't generally recommend laptops for encoding as they can run very hot with a long encode.
And the upper end laptops cost a lot.... Often more than a desktop PC with decent specifications.
Good for portability, but you would probably still end up with some external USB HDDs for large files.

I build my desktop PCs, so I prefer assembling exactly what I want.
I don't spend a lot for graphics cards as I only use them for display.

My present main PC:

W7 Home Premium 64Bit OS
AMD FX-8350 8 Core CPU 4.2Ghz
1600MB G. Skill DDR3 1866 RAM
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 MB
Nvidia GeForce GT610 Graphics

Corsair H50 Hydro CPU cooler

1 X 250GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO Boot Drive
4 X 1500GB Western Digital SATA VI Data Drives

But you will likely get a lot of suggestions.

EDIT: And I should ask, 'What format/codecs are you planning to use?'
What is your video source. I'm guessing a camcorder or similar.

And welcome to our forums.

[usually_quiet]

Hi, new user here!

I been researching different hardware to start learning and well doing some short 1-15 min short commercials-films. I will provide my hardware currently below. For the moment, Im so interested to get the dell xps laptop as I heard good things. However due to budgets, and well, want to start learning, I will stick to my pc desktop. So I bought this dell desktop from canadacomouters for like 200$. not bad but obviouslt not enough ram and gig and and well, graphics card. I know I can build my own if I really research and find what I need, some would cost maybe around 800$ for a good i7 intel with gforce graphics 4 gig ram. now as i said im learning but in same time I want to produce content I also will be using adobe after effects templates to apply to my videos and I wanted your recommendation on what should I do or maybe I will just wait and save for my dell xos )

im looking for something now. I was thinking of buying 4gig ram and a graphics card only to upgrafe my current system. It will make it total 8gig ram with say a 2 gig ram video card andpron upgrade harddrive.

Its prob going to cost around 300$ canadian.

Do you have any opinions on my deicision or scratch the 200$ computer and just spend more on a bult? Im trying to utilise my resources and my budget. So maybe I can get a helping hand ?

Cheers

- intel core duo cpu 2.33ghz
- 64bit windows 10
- 4 gig ram
- windows 7 home premium sp1
- 500GIG

The $200 Core 2 Duo would be OK for email and web-surfing, but could struggle with editing HD video even after upgrading.

A pre-built system may cost less than building your own unless you can re-use a lot of the components in an existing system. However, you won't be able to re-use much from your Core 2 Duo system other than the drives and possibly the case. The power supply is almost certainly inadequate, and you cannot re-use the OS license.

I went online and checked prices. A new Kaby Lake i7 7700 CPU costs about $400 Canadian dollars all by itself, making $800 a very tight budget for a new i7 system build. An $800 budget would be more reasonable for an i5 build. An i5-7500 CPU costs $265.