19 replies to this topic

[Dude]

My old Intel 6750 Dual Core build is 3.5 years old and wasn't really up to the task of editing high definition video.
It can do it, just it takes a while and pushes the CPU to its limit.

So I decided its time to build a new PC.
I selected my parts months ago and have been waiting for the revised Sandy Bridge Gigabyte boards to arrive in Australia.
This is my 10th PC build, the PC parts are:-

Cooler Master RC-690 II Advance Mid Tower Chassis
120 GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD
Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB HDD
Benq GL2430HM 24" LED Monitor
XFX Radeon HD6850 1GB Video Card
Shintaro SH-ICR3 Internal 3.5" 30-in-1 card reader
Intel Corei5 2500K
Gigabyte GA-P67-UD3R-B3
Coolermaster Silent Pro M700W PSU
Gskill 4x4GB Ripjaws DDR3 1600
Corsair H70 CPU Liquid Cooler
LG BH10 Blue Ray Burner
ASUS DVD Burner
Windows 7 Home Premium

I finished the build about 3 weeks ago and its been rock solid, I'm very happy with it.
Its 8 - 9 times faster rendering video than my previous machine, which may not seem like much, but its the difference between waiting 4 hours for a clip to render or 20 mins (Awesome).

The OCZ SSD drive is fast, could never go back to a spindle drive my previous machine had a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 running the OS but its the CPU & GPU that matter when encoding video.

The Case is the best mid tower case I have ever used, it is light yet strong, you can pick it up with the sides off and there is no flex.
Was super easy to work with, all the drives go into a toolless cradle and the cables go into the back maximising the air flow.
There are lots of cable ties and holes to enable tidy cable work. I like the Disk Docking station built into the top of the case, it works perfectly and is hot swappable.

This is the first time I've used a liquid cooling device and I selected the H70 as I intend to overclock.
I have overclocked the CPU to 4.2GHZ and all cores run under 30C at idle and under 35 when I'm rendering, I haven't run any heavy duty benchmarks yet, but
the bottom line is this is an awesome editing machine. Still need to play around some more to see what the limits of the Corei5 is with this cooler.

The H70 fitted where the original case exhaust fan was so I moved that fan to the top of the case.
Overall I have 5 fans in total yet is reasonably quiet.
Well its quiet now but it wasn't at first, the H70 radiator fans were on max and the box sounded like a Black Hawk Helicopter fully loaded taking off, but a bios adjustment fixed that.

Its Windows score is 7.6

Was a really easy straight forward build. The only issue I had was I seated the motherboard before I installed the H70 and the hole in the mobo wall wasn't adequate to fit the H70 so I had to remove the motherboard to
fit the H70 and re-install.

I built my first PC 20 years ago and when I think about how easy this was and the power to cost ratio its mind numbing.
I maintain financial records (well what are computers for) and tonight I was browsing through what I have purchased over the years and I bought a 15inch TFT monitor in Jan 2002 for $1300, hard to believe, this PC only cost a little more, however it was a beautiful monitor and I still have it.

Will post some pictures if some-one can tell me how....Thanks

[ImTheTypeOfGuy]

You have to host your pictures on another site and then you link to that picture here, using the "insert image" link (two icon's to the right of the smiley face).

One thing that will speed up your rendering is if you put two spindles in raid and put your video files on it. This will speed up writing and improve it a lot. I actually have the source file on two Raid 0 drives and then burn to 4 Raid 0 drives. Will make significant improvements.

[pcdoc]

Awesome build. Certainly believe that there was a huge improvement. Congrats and I am glad it worked out. Look forward to your pictures.

[Dude]

You have to host your pictures on another site and then you link to that picture here, using the "insert image" link (two icon's to the right of the smiley face).

One thing that will speed up your rendering is if you put two spindles in raid and put your video files on it. This will speed up writing and improve it a lot. I actually have the source file on two Raid 0 drives and then burn to 4 Raid 0 drives. Will make significant improvements.

A Raid 0 setup is probably the next tweak I will do, I have experimented with Raid on a previous corei7 build I did for a friend and it marginally improved the rendering time. The Seagate is a Sata3 drive so its fast.

[Dude]

My old Intel 6750 Dual Core build is 3.5 years old and wasn't really up to the task of editing high definition video.
It can do it, just it takes a while and pushes the CPU to its limit.

So I decided its time to build a new PC.
I selected my parts months ago and have been waiting for the revised Sandy Bridge Gigabyte boards to arrive in Australia.
This is my 10th PC build, the PC parts are:-

Cooler Master RC-690 II Advance Mid Tower Chassis
120 GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD
Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB HDD
Benq GL2430HM 24" LED Monitor
XFX Radeon HD6850 1GB Video Card
Shintaro SH-ICR3 Internal 3.5" 30-in-1 card reader
Intel Corei5 2500K
Gigabyte GA-P67-UD3R-B3
Coolermaster Silent Pro M700W PSU
Gskill 4x4GB Ripjaws DDR3 1600
Corsair H70 CPU Liquid Cooler
LG BH10 Blue Ray Burner
ASUS DVD Burner
Windows 7 Home Premium

I finished the build about 3 weeks ago and its been rock solid, I'm very happy with it.
Its 8 - 9 times faster rendering video than my previous machine, which may not seem like much, but its the difference between waiting 4 hours for a clip to render or 20 mins (Awesome).

The OCZ SSD drive is fast, could never go back to a spindle drive my previous machine had a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 running the OS but its the CPU & GPU that matter when encoding video.

The Case is the best mid tower case I have ever used, it is light yet strong, you can pick it up with the sides off and there is no flex.
Was super easy to work with, all the drives go into a toolless cradle and the cables go into the back maximising the air flow.
There are lots of cable ties and holes to enable tidy cable work. I like the Disk Docking station built into the top of the case, it works perfectly and is hot swappable.

This is the first time I've used a liquid cooling device and I selected the H70 as I intend to overclock.
I have overclocked the CPU to 4.2GHZ and all cores run under 30C at idle and under 35 when I'm rendering, I haven't run any heavy duty benchmarks yet, but
the bottom line is this is an awesome editing machine. Still need to play around some more to see what the limits of the Corei5 is with this cooler.

The H70 fitted where the original case exhaust fan was so I moved that fan to the top of the case.
Overall I have 5 fans in total yet is reasonably quiet.
Well its quiet now but it wasn't at first, the H70 radiator fans were on max and the box sounded like a Black Hawk Helicopter fully loaded taking off, but a bios adjustment fixed that.

Its Windows score is 7.6

Was a really easy straight forward build. The only issue I had was I seated the motherboard before I installed the H70 and the hole in the mobo wall wasn't adequate to fit the H70 so I had to remove the motherboard to
fit the H70 and re-install.

I built my first PC 20 years ago and when I think about how easy this was and the power to cost ratio its mind numbing.
I maintain financial records (well what are computers for) and tonight I was browsing through what I have purchased over the years and I bought a 15inch TFT monitor in Jan 2002 for $1300, hard to believe, this PC only cost a little more, however it was a beautiful monitor and I still have it.

Will post some pictures if some-one can tell me how....Thanks

In the next Picture the Red Sata cables are part of the Case, they provide esata at the front and the Hot Swappable docking station built into the top, that works a treat. (Hurray no more cables or HDD box, just plug in the HDD and away it goes).



Look how nice the H70 Liquid cooler fits into the rear exhaust port, original exhaust fan relocated to the top


Who would have thought a Windows Index would be limited by a 128GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD and a 4.1GHZ 4 core CPU

Edited by Dude, 27 May 2011 - 04:52 PM.

[dagamer34]

You can't hit 7.9 on the CPU score without at least having either 6 or 8 physical cores (I can't remember which).

Edited by dagamer34, 28 May 2011 - 09:19 AM.

[jvk]

@ Dude: Thanks for sharing your build. I am looking to build something similar since my wife and I are having a baby in October which means there will be lots of home videos to edit and my current PC is just not up to the task. I have a couple of questions...

- Is the SSD drive used just for the OS or do you store some of your HD video on it as well?
- Since I am new to HD video editing, on average what would be the size of a 10 minute clip of HD video? I know the answer to that varies alot, but what is your estimation?
- What software do you use to edit video and Author DVDs?

Thanks,

jvk

[ImTheTypeOfGuy]

@ Dude: Thanks for sharing your build. I am looking to build something similar since my wife and I are having a baby in October which means there will be lots of home videos to edit and my current PC is just not up to the task. I have a couple of questions...

- Is the SSD drive used just for the OS or do you store some of your HD video on it as well?
- Since I am new to HD video editing, on average what would be the size of a 10 minute clip of HD video? I know the answer to that varies alot, but what is your estimation?
- What software do you use to edit video and Author DVDs?

Thanks,

jvk

I do a lot of HD editing. I do not put my video on my SSD. I keep my raw video on my server. Once I am ready to edit, I copy it to a striped array with three disks. I then edit it and writ it back to the striped array. I then put the finished product back on my server.

I use, and suggest Power Director if you have a 64 bit system. Also, if you have an Invidia GPU it will do some of the processing for you so it will improve the rendering time.

[ikon]

Nice build. Glad to hear you're finding it so much better. Look forward to hearing how RAID striping goes once you have it running.

[Dude]

@ Dude: Thanks for sharing your build. I am looking to build something similar since my wife and I are having a baby in October which means there will be lots of home videos to edit and my current PC is just not up to the task. I have a couple of questions...

- Is the SSD drive used just for the OS or do you store some of your HD video on it as well?
- Since I am new to HD video editing, on average what would be the size of a 10 minute clip of HD video? I know the answer to that varies alot, but what is your estimation?
- What software do you use to edit video and Author DVDs?

Thanks,

jvk

The SSD is used for OS and my general windows directory drive eg documents,etc.
My unedited video I store on the 2TB Hard Drive.
I've thought about adding a 30GB SSD as a workspace type of set-up, eg I transfer the raw video I wanted to edit to the SSD/OS drive and render and write to the smaller SSD drive.
Overall though I don't think drive speed is a major bottleneck as the HD LED flickers, its not like the LED is hard on and this drive is one of the fastest spindle drives on the market.

I rendered a 10 min H264 Dolby 5.1 1920 x1080 and the file size of the final video was 1.16GB.
When you edit video you end up creating heaps of files as you trim, render and experiment but 2TB is loads.

I use Power Director 9, its 64 bit and thats what you want, it works effortlessly with my set-up, previous machine, everything happened so slowly, as you are pushing technology when you start doing special effects etc.
I have tried most of the market leaders video editers, I was a Ulead/Video Studio fan for years, but they just haven't got the HD Video right.

PD9 has a fantastic web site with video tutorials showing the amazing things you can do.
It also has an area where people save their creations, either videos, DVD menus, or special effect items you can download and use in your video.
You can download the full program for free for a 30 day trial, so that gives you a chance to see if you like it.

Make sure you install a Blueray Burner though, I was amazed at how quick PD9 authored and burned a 25GB Bluray all in under 20 mins.(the video had been previously rendered in the correct format.

You can use DVD blamks and burn 20mins of AVCHD format which can be played on most BlueRay players, but you will eventually tire of this and want to watch BlueRay durations.

Good Luck with the build.

[PINKTULIP]

You have to host your pictures on another site and then you link to that picture here, using the "insert image" link (two icon's to the right of the smiley face).

One thing that will speed up your rendering is if you put two spindles in raid and put your video files on it. This will speed up writing and improve it a lot. I actually have the source file on two Raid 0 drives and then burn to 4 Raid 0 drives. Will make significant improvements.

Just read with great interest the above build, as I have just ordered a bunch of bits to do video editing myself, I intend using Adobe Premiere CS5.5

components are as follows.



Coolermaster Centurion 5 II SPECIAL EDITION with Red Interior - With Coolermaster 650W GX PSU
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 Z68 Socket 1155 7.1 Channel HD Audio ATX Motherboard
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev 2 Socket 775, 1156, 1155, 1366, AM2, AM3 Heatpipe CPU Cooler
Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz Socket 1155 8MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
OCZ Agility 3 Series 60GB SATA III 2.5 inch Solid State Drive
Western Digital Caviar 2TB (7200 RPM) SATA 6GB/s 64MB 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive - Black
4 X 4Gb G-Skill DDR3 1600Mhz RipjawsX Memory 1.5V
Pioneer DVRS19LBK 24x DVD±RW DL & RAM with Labelflash SATA Optical Drive - Retail Box Black with Software

I have a couple of questions.

I note the comment regarding adding a second spindle drive and running it in a RAID 0 config - will this make much of a difference and is it worth me spending a further £115 for a second 2TB Black Caviar?

Also I remember a conversation a while ago on one of the podcasts which talked about changes in the BIOS to get the best performance from the 1600Mhz Ram, is there anything special I need to do?

This is the first time I have built a box where I need to fit the processor to the mobo, I have always done it before using a mobo/processor bundle. I have ordered some Arctic Silver paste, any tips on this would be much appreciated.

I should have all the parts by the end of next week, and intend doing an unboxing video and perhaps a build video as well, but I would love any input before I dive in and do something I shouldn't, I am already starting to feel like a kid in a sweet shop and that is before any of the kit arrives!!

Thanks in anticipation!

Pete

[pcdoc]

Just read with great interest the above build, as I have just ordered a bunch of bits to do video editing myself, I intend using Adobe Premiere CS5.5

components are as follows.



Coolermaster Centurion 5 II SPECIAL EDITION with Red Interior - With Coolermaster 650W GX PSU
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 Z68 Socket 1155 7.1 Channel HD Audio ATX Motherboard
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev 2 Socket 775, 1156, 1155, 1366, AM2, AM3 Heatpipe CPU Cooler
Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz Socket 1155 8MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
OCZ Agility 3 Series 60GB SATA III 2.5 inch Solid State Drive
Western Digital Caviar 2TB (7200 RPM) SATA 6GB/s 64MB 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive - Black
4 X 4Gb G-Skill DDR3 1600Mhz RipjawsX Memory 1.5V
Pioneer DVRS19LBK 24x DVD±RW DL & RAM with Labelflash SATA Optical Drive - Retail Box Black with Software

I have a couple of questions.

I note the comment regarding adding a second spindle drive and running it in a RAID 0 config - will this make much of a difference and is it worth me spending a further £115 for a second 2TB Black Caviar?

Also I remember a conversation a while ago on one of the podcasts which talked about changes in the BIOS to get the best performance from the 1600Mhz Ram, is there anything special I need to do?

This is the first time I have built a box where I need to fit the processor to the mobo, I have always done it before using a mobo/processor bundle. I have ordered some Arctic Silver paste, any tips on this would be much appreciated.

I should have all the parts by the end of next week, and intend doing an unboxing video and perhaps a build video as well, but I would love any input before I dive in and do something I shouldn't, I am already starting to feel like a kid in a sweet shop and that is before any of the kit arrives!!

Thanks in anticipation!

Pete

General Comments: Consider the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS instead of the Agility. More robust, faster, and more reliable memory chips.

1. Personally I would not do the RAID 0. I just removed mine and went back to a single drive. It is a personal preference but found it to be more trouble than its worth.

2. Using that board and the ripjawx you should not have to make BIOS changes. The new Z68 series from gigabyte do a good job reading the ram.

3. Just apply it thin and even and across the entire processor and you should be good.

4. I am sure this might be a bit to basic for you but I have a 7 part series on building a PC from scratch just in case.

http://win7king.word...p-system-build/


Good luck and let us know how it goes.

[Dude]

Just read with great interest the above build, as I have just ordered a bunch of bits to do video editing myself, I intend using Adobe Premiere CS5.5

components are as follows.



Coolermaster Centurion 5 II SPECIAL EDITION with Red Interior - With Coolermaster 650W GX PSU
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 Z68 Socket 1155 7.1 Channel HD Audio ATX Motherboard
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev 2 Socket 775, 1156, 1155, 1366, AM2, AM3 Heatpipe CPU Cooler
Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz Socket 1155 8MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
OCZ Agility 3 Series 60GB SATA III 2.5 inch Solid State Drive
Western Digital Caviar 2TB (7200 RPM) SATA 6GB/s 64MB 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive - Black
4 X 4Gb G-Skill DDR3 1600Mhz RipjawsX Memory 1.5V
Pioneer DVRS19LBK 24x DVD±RW DL & RAM with Labelflash SATA Optical Drive - Retail Box Black with Software

I have a couple of questions.

I note the comment regarding adding a second spindle drive and running it in a RAID 0 config - will this make much of a difference and is it worth me spending a further £115 for a second 2TB Black Caviar?

Also I remember a conversation a while ago on one of the podcasts which talked about changes in the BIOS to get the best performance from the 1600Mhz Ram, is there anything special I need to do?

This is the first time I have built a box where I need to fit the processor to the mobo, I have always done it before using a mobo/processor bundle. I have ordered some Arctic Silver paste, any tips on this would be much appreciated.

I should have all the parts by the end of next week, and intend doing an unboxing video and perhaps a build video as well, but I would love any input before I dive in and do something I shouldn't, I am already starting to feel like a kid in a sweet shop and that is before any of the kit arrives!!

Thanks in anticipation!

Pete

I'm using a Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD3R-B3 and 16GB of Ripjaw 1600 Ram and it recognised it properly, didn't need to do anything to the bios

[ImTheTypeOfGuy]

Like pcdoc states, two spindles in raid0 is personal choice. However, I saw increased performance and have never had a problem with it. I have been running my set up like this for about 10 years. Obviously this is across a lot of machines and have never had a problem.

[ikon]

Like pcdoc states, two spindles in raid0 is personal choice. However, I saw increased performance and have never had a problem with it. I have been running my set up like this for about 10 years. Obviously this is across a lot of machines and have never had a problem.

As always, your comfort level with running any level of RAID will increase exponentially if you have a good, repeatable and easily restorable backup solution in place.

[Dude]

Just ordered a RAID card for to install in my PC, so will see how it goes, am going to Raid 0 two 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD's. I have the need for speed

Edited by Dude, 19 August 2011 - 01:13 AM.

[Dude]

I had been waiting patiently to install a low end Raid card the Adaptec 1220SA Raid card, I have recently replaced the Vertex 2 120GB drive with a Vertex 3 for my OS, so thought, why not buy another Vertex 2 120GB drive and put them in RAID 0 to see what sort of performance I get. Well the results are not too good. I have downloaded the latest Adaptec drivers and built the array. The read figures using ATTO disk Benchmark and Crystal Disk Mark are about half the throughput compared to when the drives are unraided !!!. I have flashed the SSD ROM's to the same version, however the older drive (6 months) definitely is coming up a little slower in the benchmarks, so I would expect this could slow down the striping a little as the faster drive waits for the slower drive, but surely not this much. Very disappointing!! Any suggestions?
Here are the results
http://members.iinet...d%20Results.mht

[ImTheTypeOfGuy]

I don't know if this is the issue but I definitely would not raid a series two with a series three.

[Dude]

Latest Update folks, I have taken PCDOCs advice and used the Gigabyte onboard RAID to create a Raid Array of two Vertex 2 SSD 120GB dives striped Raid 0. I'm using this array for HD video rendering, so I'm not concerned about fault tolerance as the files will be backed up on my WHS each night. My vertex 3 is unraided and is being used for the Operating System. The results using ATTO Benchmark are amazing!! Using Crystal mark I got very different results which weren't as outstanding but they were much higher than when the drives were unraided, so overall I'm feeling that the effort (to rebuild my C drive) was worthwhile. I guess time will tell.

I would be interested if some-one could advise me on why the big differences between the two benchmarking tools.

Here are the results
http://members.iinet... benchmarks.mht

On another note, is there a way I can inbed this wep page into the forum rather then using a link

[ikon]

On another note, is there a way I can inbed this wep page into the forum rather then using a link

Not that I'm aware of. Dave did mention that he might arrange it so people could store the document/image files on the forum server itself, but AFAIK, you can only include them in posts by embedding a link.