Building PC specifically for converting

[willardd]

hey everyone,

looking to build a new pc as a media hub for my house. I've tried to do a bit of a search but havent found a distinct answer or recommendation.

if im building a new PC what should i bump up in the way of hardware to get faster speeds for converting?

current computer i have which is just an 'off the shelf' model takes approx 1hr - 1hr 20m for a 44min episode to convert (i think most files run at approx 150% of episode/movie length for conversion to divx on my machine)

is it possible to do it faster? what do i need to help with this?

thanks in advance

[redwudz]

Faster CPU=Faster encoding. Simple as that. A newer quad core CPU can also help because it can spread the encoding over all four cores, if the encoder can do multi-threading.

For RAM, 2GB is about max for a 32 bit OS like XP or Vista. 2GB is almost a requirement for Vista. More won't help much. XP only needs 1GB most times.

Then lots of hard drive space. I would have at least two drives, three is better. The boot drive doesn't need to big very big, but the others can be. I use 320GB drives, but 500GB drives are cheap enough at present. I would recommend SATA drives. SATA also works well for the optical drives.

I prefer the Gigabyte motherboards at present, but there are a lot of good ones available.

The video card doesn't usually need to be anything special, but needs the proper outputs for your media display.

All JMO.

[aedipuss]

faster cpu/faster ram/faster drives. it just depends on how much you want to spend - a thousand dollars or much more. a fast cpu like the new intel yorkfield extreme quad goes for about a $1000 by itself. add 4 gb of ddr3 memory and an intel x38 based m.b. and 5 or 6 fast raptor hard drives for a nice array and on and on.... it adds up quickly.

[redwudz]

For about $265US, you could get a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz CPU. With the rest of the parts, you could get away with $500 - $600US and have a fairly good setup. But it's easy to spend more.

Once you decide on a CPU, then a motherboard, the rest is easy to figure out.

One CPU comparison list is here: http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html

[zookeeper525]

pretty much what everyone up there said lol



if you didnt know about newegg.com i would go there


i got all my parts for my first build off that site and they all work great and they are very cheap

[redwudz]

willardd's in Aus , so here is one dealer to check that seems to have reasonable prices: http://www.secret.com.au/cgi-bin/computers/trialdb.pl

This is a quote I assembled from their pages. It doesn't include a operating system or tax and shipping, but the major components are good quality. Prices in Aus dollars. This might give you an idea of what to look for:

[rcguy1]

I like your list of parts but the power supply is kind of weak. I built a computer using Newegg with most of the parts you mentioned CPU Qrad 6600 and the same motherboard. Used different memory and a Samsung 500Gig harddrive. For the power supply I went with a 750watt Zephyr. You'll need the extra wattage for this system. ALSO, NEVER BUY A CASE WITH THE POWER SUPPLY INCLUDED. They are usually garbage.

[redwudz]

Probably the only thing 'power hungry' there would be the video card. But I agree, these days 380W is on the 'light' side. I would prefer about 450W -500W. 750W would seem overkill unless you have dual SLI video cards. I run nine hard drives and a burner, along with six fans in one of my servers with a 450W PS. And it ran with a 350W PS for a while with no problems.

[neomaine]

Willardd,

I also agree on Redwudz list. Solid parts at a good price. Though, I'd double up on the 320gig hard drives. And, that's assuming you already have something for your OS drive. For a good encoding/media setup, as redwudz describes, you need to seperate your OS activity/software from your media drives.

This allows all the menial program activity to come from the OS drive and leaves you the other two to use as companion drives for the video work. Use one drive as source while the other as destination. This allows you to keep thrashing (read and write to same drive) and fragmentation (non-contiguous file allocation) down to a minimum. This and regular defragging helps keep your drives MTBF high and your reads/write consistent.

For example, I'm copying my DVD collection to my hard drives to stream to my XBOX 360. My SOP is to copy the DVD to drive 1, convert to divx to drive 2, mux audio/video back to drive 1. Neither drive at any time does BOTH read and write. Just one or the other. I schedule an automatic defrag every week. Max I/O across drives = smooth sailing.

[rhegedus]

I built a new PC back in August and the specs are pretty similar to what everyone recommends:

Q6600
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P
Corsair 2Gb DDR2 PC6400
NVidia 8600GT

Stuff like hard drives is more of an individual choice but I'd agree with what everyone says: get a smaller HD for the OS and at least 2 500GB SATA drives, one for source video and the other for output video. A 1TB external drive can be hand for archive and long term storage purposes.

Here's a handy comparison of CPU performances:

[redwudz]

That $1008AU quote comes up to about $930US. I agree about the drives, I just put one in there for simplicity. The 8600 video card was just a guess, depends on what you want to do with the video. I would also add a second burner, but that's just my preference. Makes it easy to back up DVDs and makes it more versatile. I'm not a fan of Antec PSs, I would probably use a different brand.

That same setup came to about $810US from NewEgg, with $65 in discounts added in. That makes it fairly close to the AU quote.

But a similar setup to that quoted computer should work very well for encoding.

[willardd]

thanks a bunch for the advice everyone - all your advice has been well documented and taken on board

ive been just doin 'band aid' solutions on my off the shelf machine to get the longest amount of time out of it as possible

so all your info is gonna be a great start in building a new tower

thanks again everyone

[rcguy1]

I see George Peppard is alive and well and living life as rhegedus.