New PC For Video Editing: Are these Specs ok...?

[Paul Cooksley]

Hi there

I am toying with the idea of getting a new pc, really primarily for video editing - I was thinking of getting one online, from Dell and wondered how these specs sound:-
PROCESSOR Intel® Viiv™ Core™ 2 Duo E6400 Processor (2.13GHz, 1066MHz, 2MB) edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005 (Does not include Operating System Re-installation CD) edit
VISTA UPGRADE MCE to Vista Premium Upgrade on: www.dellvistaupgrade.productorder.com before 03/31/07 edit
SUPPORT SERVICES Basic Package, 3 Year At-Home Service edit
MONITOR Dell™ 19" Value Flat Panel (E197FP) edit
MEMORY 2048MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz [4x512] Memory edit
HARD DRIVE 320GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache edit
OPTICAL DRIVE(S) 16x DVD +/- RW & 16x IDE DVD ROM Drive edit
GRAPHICS CARD 256MB ATI® Radeon® X1300 Pro PCI Express graphics card edit
Accessories
SOUND CARDS Integrated Sound Blaster® Audigy™ ADVANCED HD software edit
SPEAKERS Dell™ A225 Stereo Speakers edit
KEYBOARD Dell™ Entry Quietkey USB Keyboard - UK/Ire (QWERTY) edit
MOUSE Dell 2 Button USB Scroll Optical Mouse - Black edit
FLOPPY/MEDIA DRIVES Internal 13-in-1 Media Card Reader edit
MODEMS No Modem edit
TV TUNERS Integrated Analogue TV tuner PCI card and Dell™

What do people think? Would this be powerful enough to cope with alot of video editing as well as general use?

Any help appreciated

Cheers

Paul

[redsox_mark]

Plenty powerful enough. I assume it has a Firewire port, you'll need that (the spec doesn't say). If not you can always add one, but might as well get it up front.

[Paul Cooksley]

oh yes, firewire, I forgot that! Good point! I'd have to check actually..

Does the graphics card specs specifically sound ok? i.e. "256MB ATI® Radeon® X1300 Pro PCI Express graphics card"

I have no idea if this is "run of the mill" for a graphics card or quite good.....


Thanks

[sprognak]

Originally Posted by Paul Cooksley

Hi there

I am toying with the idea of getting a new pc, really primarily for video editing - I was thinking of getting one online, from Dell and wondered how these specs sound:-
PROCESSOR Intel® Viiv™ Core™ 2 Duo E6400 Processor (2.13GHz, 1066MHz, 2MB) edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005 (Does not include Operating System Re-installation CD) edit
VISTA UPGRADE MCE to Vista Premium Upgrade on: www.dellvistaupgrade.productorder.com before 03/31/07 edit
SUPPORT SERVICES Basic Package, 3 Year At-Home Service edit
MONITOR Dell™ 19" Value Flat Panel (E197FP) edit
MEMORY 2048MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz [4x512] Memory edit
HARD DRIVE 320GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache edit
OPTICAL DRIVE(S) 16x DVD +/- RW & 16x IDE DVD ROM Drive edit
GRAPHICS CARD 256MB ATI® Radeon® X1300 Pro PCI Express graphics card edit
Accessories
SOUND CARDS Integrated Sound Blaster® Audigy™ ADVANCED HD software edit
SPEAKERS Dell™ A225 Stereo Speakers edit
KEYBOARD Dell™ Entry Quietkey USB Keyboard - UK/Ire (QWERTY) edit
MOUSE Dell 2 Button USB Scroll Optical Mouse - Black edit
FLOPPY/MEDIA DRIVES Internal 13-in-1 Media Card Reader edit
MODEMS No Modem edit
TV TUNERS Integrated Analogue TV tuner PCI card and Dell™

What do people think? Would this be powerful enough to cope with alot of video editing as well as general use?

Any help appreciated

Cheers

Paul

Ok, CPU is fine, it's a dual core which will crunch through things nicely. It has the lower cache size of 2Mb (6600 and above Dual Cores have 4Mb) which while it won't be slow, will not be as fast as a 6600. (Realistically around a 15% max increase would be seen on a 6600 due to the cache).

RAM is plentiful, although 533MHz is slow for a Core Duo. It should really be ticking at 800MHz or possibly even at 1066MHz. In video processing, RAM bandwidth is critical. Still, it's just a question of "how fast is fast".

Any modern hard drive will be up to the task. I'd question whether to get a second drive - note that Dell overcharge like nothing you've ever seen for these. To buy one online you're looking at £70 for another 320Gb with 16Mb Cache.

Graphics card, the X1300 aren't bad cards. Reasonably quick. The NVidia's tend to have a few more optimisations for video work, but not noticably so. Overall the spec looks decent. It isn't earth-shatteringly good, but it should be more than up to the task. Top end you're looking at the newly introduced 8800 Nvidias, though only released today these cost more for the card than most PC's.

Reasonably priced top end cards come in around £150-£200 for a Radeon X1900XT or a GeForce 7900GT...

[sandstheman]

Emm i might be wrong here - but in terms of video editing it doesn't really matter if you have the latest and greatest video card, unless your doing some fancy 3d editing. Yes some of the cards do have 'optimisations' for video, but in nearly all cases this is usually for video playback and the mid level ATI and nVidia cards all have these. I've built a similarly specced PC for video editing with the X1300 and it's had no problems dealing with editing a raw video file over 6hrs long.

As far as the rest of the spec goes, it seems plenty powerful to me

[redsox_mark]

I'm no PC hardware expert, but for editing DV it's true that the graphics card doesn't matter... I've edited complex projects on a bog-standard 650 Mhz P3 laptop....

But a graphics card can help in editing, depending on the software used. I know that Vegas, which I use, does NOT use the GPU on the graphics card when rendering; but I believe some do.

None of this will stop you from being able to edit, but it is possible with the right software and the right graphics card that your render times could be reduced. And if you are going to get into HDV or especially AVCHD, the more power the better.

[sandstheman]

Originally Posted by redsox_mark

I'm no PC hardware expert, but for editing DV it's true that the graphics card doesn't matter... I've edited complex projects on a bog-standard 650 Mhz P3 laptop....

But a graphics card can help in editing, depending on the software used. I know that Vegas, which I use, does NOT use the GPU on the graphics card when rendering; but I believe some do.

None of this will stop you from being able to edit, but it is possible with the right software and the right graphics card that your render times could be reduced. And if you are going to get into HDV or especially AVCHD, the more power the better.

I stand corrected, apparently Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 does use the GPU, but only to enable 5 extra video transitions that use a 3D effect

http://www.adobe.com/products/vector...?contentID=GPU

Any other programs that use the GPU are still extremely rare if non existant, there are dedicated DV editing cards you can get, which are likely to be more beneficial than a faster gfx card

[Paul Cooksley]

Many thanks for all your replies so far... once last favour.... I don't know an awful lot about pc's but again, bearing in mind this would be primarily for video editing, can I ask one more last favour? My current pc (which has performed pretty well) came from Mesh - so I was checking out their website and came up with this for much the same price as the Dell one I quoted the specs for at the begining of this thread...

Can anyone advise, looking at these new specs from Mesh whether it is better/same as the Dell one I quoted originally at the top of this thread? They are about the same price, all said and done....

Specs (MESH)
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6400 Dual Core Processor(2.13GHz,2MB Cache,1066MHz)
Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005
Midi-Tower ATX Case +550W PSU -Black/Silver
ASUS P5NSLI NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI Mainboard - Pentium® D/Core™ 2 Duo - ATX
1024MB DDR2 533MHz Memory - (2x512MB)
320GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB Buffer [upg £ 20.00]
Super Format SONY 18x Dual Layer DVD Writer +R/-R/RW/RAM
16x DVD-ROM Drive (40x CD-ROM) [upg £ 12.00]
512MB DDR2 nVIDIA GeForce 7300GS - TV out- DVI - PCIe (256Mb SMA)
19" SONY SDM-HS95PR TFT LCD Flat Panel Display -DVI-D (8ms) [upg £ 50.00]
DVI connector Cable [upg £ 5.00]
5.1 High Definition 6 Channel Audio Codec (on-board)
Logitech Cordless Keyboard & Cordless Optical Mouse
Microsoft® WorksSuite® 2006 [upg £ 29.00]
Symantec Norton Internet Security 2007 (oem) [upg £ 33.19]
Firewire PCI Card - adds IEEE1394 Connectivity to your PC [upg £ 10.00]
External 36-in-1 USB Card Reader [upg £ 10.00]
Classic Plus Warranty - 1 Year On-site + 2 Years BTB -T&C [upg £ 39.00]

Many, many thanks - I really appreciate any help

Cheers

Paul

[sprognak]

Sorry for the delayed response, only just caught up with the thread.

Actually many cards have programmable embedded encoders for real-time or faster video encoding leaving the CPU free. The first cards to offer a "usable" version of this were the GeForce 6800 series and progressed to the 7xxx series of cards also. ATI's have a similar system but in this arena, NVidia hold the trump card.

Again, the difference won't be major for casual editing, but if you are taking a lot of video and want to edit and encode fast, it may be worth considering...

[sprognak]

Originally Posted by Paul Cooksley

Many thanks for all your replies so far... once last favour.... I don't know an awful lot about pc's but again, bearing in mind this would be primarily for video editing, can I ask one more last favour? My current pc (which has performed pretty well) came from Mesh - so I was checking out their website and came up with this for much the same price as the Dell one I quoted the specs for at the begining of this thread...

Can anyone advise, looking at these new specs from Mesh whether it is better/same as the Dell one I quoted originally at the top of this thread? They are about the same price, all said and done....

Specs (MESH)
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6400 Dual Core Processor(2.13GHz,2MB Cache,1066MHz)
Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005
Midi-Tower ATX Case +550W PSU -Black/Silver
ASUS P5NSLI NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI Mainboard - Pentium® D/Core™ 2 Duo - ATX
1024MB DDR2 533MHz Memory - (2x512MB)
320GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB Buffer [upg £ 20.00]
Super Format SONY 18x Dual Layer DVD Writer +R/-R/RW/RAM
16x DVD-ROM Drive (40x CD-ROM) [upg £ 12.00]
512MB DDR2 nVIDIA GeForce 7300GS - TV out- DVI - PCIe (256Mb SMA)
19" SONY SDM-HS95PR TFT LCD Flat Panel Display -DVI-D (8ms) [upg £ 50.00]
DVI connector Cable [upg £ 5.00]
5.1 High Definition 6 Channel Audio Codec (on-board)
Logitech Cordless Keyboard & Cordless Optical Mouse
Microsoft® WorksSuite® 2006 [upg £ 29.00]
Symantec Norton Internet Security 2007 (oem) [upg £ 33.19]
Firewire PCI Card - adds IEEE1394 Connectivity to your PC [upg £ 10.00]
External 36-in-1 USB Card Reader [upg £ 10.00]
Classic Plus Warranty - 1 Year On-site + 2 Years BTB -T&C [upg £ 39.00]

Many, many thanks - I really appreciate any help

Cheers

Paul

Looks good. Would comment again on the RAM speed, but don't pay more than £30 to swap to DDR-800 or DDR-1066.

Also the NVidia 5xx chipset motherboards are inferior to the Intel 965/975 chipsets by up to around 15% performance... Cost shouldn't be that different to request a 965/975 chipset system.

And yes, Mesh have been around a long time and are a decent enough company.

[sandstheman]

Originally Posted by sprognak

Sorry for the delayed response, only just caught up with the thread.

Actually many cards have programmable embedded encoders for real-time or faster video encoding leaving the CPU free. The first cards to offer a "usable" version of this were the GeForce 6800 series and progressed to the 7xxx series of cards also. ATI's have a similar system but in this arena, NVidia hold the trump card.

Again, the difference won't be major for casual editing, but if you are taking a lot of video and want to edit and encode fast, it may be worth considering...

Not so sure about encoders except for maybe the AVIVO ATI cards, but even then thats more for video capture than for actual rendering of edited footage, decoders definitely, ever since the days MPEG cards became popular for playing DVD's gfx cards moved into that area.

As i mentioned there are very few if any programs that actually will use the GPU in this respect (not counting custom written in-house programs that some studios will use) even Adobe Premiere Pro only uses the GPU to do a couple fancy video transitions and effects and no more.

As for the mesh PC i'd agree with Sprognak that the amount of ram would make the Dell a better proposition, in editing videos the ability to be able to load a lot more of the file into RAM rather than constantly reading it from the hard drive will make life considerably easier.

[sprognak]

High end cards will offer a slight edge in Video work but the actual difference seen in encoding may not be worth spending the extra.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce6_techspecs.html

PureVideo Technology

Adaptable programmable video processor
MPEG video encode and decode
High-definition MPEG-2 hardware acceleration
High-quality video scaling and filtering
DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
Dual integrated 400 MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048 × 1536 at 85Hz
Display gamma correction
Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window

http://www.nvidia.com/object/7_series_techspecs.html

NVIDIA® PureVideo™ Technology
Dedicated on-chip video processor
High-definition H.264, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
High-quality video scaling
Video color correction
Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window

[sandstheman]

Originally Posted by sprognak

High end cards will offer a slight edge in Video work but the actual difference seen in encoding may not be worth spending the extra.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce6_techspecs.html



http://www.nvidia.com/object/7_series_techspecs.html

Not denying the encoders won't be there, just that there is no program out there that actually utilises them fully, previews may be slightly faster, but i would imgaine the difference to be very minimal. As for final rendering i don't think the gfx card makes any noticeable impact at the moment

[Crocodile JD]

I went for a Dell dimension 9200 with the following:

Processor - Intel Viiv Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz, 1066Mhz FSB 4MB Cache)
OP - XP Media Centre with free Vista upgrade option untill March 2007
RAM - 2048MB (533MHz DDR2)
Card Reader - 13 in 1
HD - 500GB (7200rpm)
Optical Drives DVD read/writer and DVD Rom
Monitor - 19" Ultrasharp digital LCD
Graphics - 256MB Nvdia GeForce 7900GS
Firewire upgrade - 1 on front 2 on back
Sound - Sound Blaster Audigy DD7.1 compatable
Speakers - Dell stereo pair
Keyboard - Dell standard
Mouse - Logitech optical
Service - 3year home deal
Software - Various
Printer - Dell 926 All in 1 Photo Inkjet (Basic colour printer free in deal but I upgraded for extra £60)

TOTAL PRICE = £1,162 delivered (Offer finished on 29 Nov)

I think I got a pretty good deal, what do you guys think?? I did have to phone the sales order line and make a special request for the inclusion of Firewire ports at a cost of £20. Although the blurb stated that Firewire was optional, there was no allowance for it at customization.

Croc