Music/Video Machine Critique

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goku238

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I'm putting together a computer for my father and I need a little help with the hardware since I haven't really kept up with hardware for the past year or two. Anyway, this machine will be for music editing and a little bit of video editing. Note that I did not select a graphics card since there's a geforce fx 5200 that we were planning on putting in. Critiques on that choice are welcome. Also, we were going to put a 40 gb drive in there as a system drive. The 2 300 gb drives are for storage.

Antec SONATA II Black ATX Mid Tower Case
Hauppauge PCI Video Recorder, TV/FM Tuner Card, Model "WinTV-PVR250MCE"
AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 512K, L2 Cache, Socket 939 Venice core
4x Crucial 184 Pin 512MB DDR PC-3200 8T
2x Western Digital Caviar SE 300GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive, MODEL WD3000JD (we want to raid 0 these)
ASUS "A8N-SLI Deluxe" nForce4 SLI Chipset Motherboard For AMD Socket 939 CPU

All DVD drives and whatnot we're taking out of an older computer. Thoughts?
 
well if he isnt gaming why not go P4?
i cant recommend any P4s since i dont follow them at all, but they do have HT which may make them better for music/video editting

clark
 
clark45 said:
well if he isnt gaming why not go P4?
i cant recommend any P4s since i dont follow them at all, but they do have HT which may make them better for music/video editting

clark
Click to expand...
Does anyone have a suggestion for *which* p4 to go with that would more or less equal in power the athlon I had selected?
 
I'd imagine most of the software you'll be using is multithreaded, so go with a dual core processor.

Some results from the encoding test over at GamePC, here.

If you're just going to be using the system for encoding media, then I'd recommend a Pentium D -- best bang for the buck here. If you're looking for the cheapest ticket into dual-core, then the Pentium D 820 is it.

Going AMD also holds some merit in this situation -- on top of running at much lower temps than the Pentium D's, the AMD X2's tend to be quicker in games and various other single-threaded applications. AMD has also just released the X2 3800+, which is now the least expensive of the AMD's X2 line of processors... if you want to go X2 and am looking for the cheapest option, the X2 3800+ is it.
 
I also think going with a dual-core solution may be the best option. However a 3800+ X2 is around $400 so it may best to go with a Pentuim-D. I would also not use more then 2 sticks of RAM. Get 2x1GB. Also fortget about RAID-0. It may help with large files, but with the reduction in reliability just using 2 drives seperately would be more efficient. Definitely loose the SLI board too. It is just a waste of money.
 
And Im betting that the 40GB drive is *old* and more to the point, *slow*. Just use one of the 300GB as your system drive if you dont want to / cant afford a new 160/200GB drive. Oh, and agreed, dont raid the drives.
 
The Hauppauge cards are not as good as one of the ATI cards with the Theater 550 chipset.

The ATI chipset has a 3D comb filter which can make a huge difference and the price is about the same or less that the Hauppauge cards.
 
RAID-0 as a combination of boot volume and multimedia workspace is a very poor idea. However, I do agree that WD hard drives are an excellent choice, as they offer cool and quiet performance.

You would be much better off to have the drives separate, one for boot and programs, one for the music and video. Whatever gains you may have gotten from RAID-0 will be erased by having the I/O requests from the OS and applications burdening down the array. If you want to do RAID-0 for increased throughput, then pick up an 80GB boot/program drive and go to town with a pair of 250GB drives in RAID-0 for the data. Make sure you backup to DVD frequently though.
 
If your going to be using MCE then go with one of the ATI 550 based cards, any other PVR app you'll want a Hauppauge PVR150. The reason is that your only going to get any sort of support from ATI if you're using MCE and currently there are several with the cards that don't exist in MCE (which I find odd seeing as how the 550 cards aren't MCE certified yet).

I would pass on a P4 system, performance is rather lackluster for the price (even more so when your talking about the Pentium D chips), I'd stick with the 3500+ and add a vanilla 6600 or a NON Turbo Cache 6200.
 
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