Ultimate Video Editing Rig

V

vidoprof

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 3, 2007
Messages
468
1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
Photoshop / 4k Video Editing, After Effects, Premiere

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
$5k, yes.

3) Which country do you live in? If the U.S, please tell us the state and city if possible.
Tampa, FL

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. The word "Everything" is not a valid answer. Please list out all the parts you'll need.
CPU, Ram 64gb?, Case, HDs (1 ssd for OS, 1 ssd for scratch disk, 1 ssd for rendering, 1 8tb for data storage backup,

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
Brand New Build no reusing of parts

6) Will you be overclocking?
IF it really would make a big difference I would consider it

7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it?
(3) 27" (1) NEC Multisync PA 271W, (2) 27" LG Flatron 2742

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
within 2 weeks

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video (as a backup or main GPU)? UEFI? etc.
Not a clue - USB 3 for sure, Fastest Sata for HDs, As much RAM as possible

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?
No OS currently.. is Win7 64bit a better way to go over WIN 10 (I heard issues with Adobe products on Win 10...

Thanks everyone. IF spending an extra $500 - $1,000 makes sense I would. It's going to be a workhorse for strictly video and photo editing. ZERO gaming.

I know the Synology 8bay is ~$1,000 without drives and populating it with (8) WD Black 4tb drives is roughly $240 each so another $1900. So the $2900 is NOT in the $5k - $6k budget. Would the Synology 8bay for data storage - (8) WD Black 4tb drives or would RED be better as it's just data storage?

Thanks
Ryan G
 
A couple of suggestions:

-I really am a believer in ES Xeons. I've had very good luck with C0 and later chips, purchased from eBay, Taobao, and private sellers. I've used these in numerous workstations and servers that were subjected to heavy load, and it's definitely worth saving 75% on CPUs. I have not been disappointed.

-The Intel 750 is an absolute beast as a scratch disk. You'd be hard-pressed to find something better.
 
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Here's where I landed:
SuperMicro SYS-7038-A-I - $730. SuperMicro makes arguably the best DIY server & workstation gear you can buy. ASUS boards have a number of drawbacks (most annoyingly, you can't downflash to earlier BIOS if something goes wrong). I had the earlier version of this (the 7037) and it was absolutely outstanding. Plenty of room to work inside, rock-solid, quiet.. just great.

Seagate 8TB Archive HDD - $250. It's magnetic storage, it will suck no matter what. Spend your money elsewhere.

Gigabyte GTX 960 - $220. You won't be GPU limited in your workload, but this has a lot of VRAM and decent connectivity options.

Windows 10 x64 Pro - $140. Windows 10 does a lot right with storage in particular, and they are pretty aggressive with the patches. Adobe will get their act together quite rapidly, with the installed base being what it is.

Kingston 8gb (x8) registered DDR4 - $600. You have 8 more slots on the mobo if you want to upgrade later.

2x Arctic Freezer i11 - $45

2x Samsung 850 Evo 500GB - $360. It's basically just as fast as the Pro for a lot less money.

1.2TB Intel 750 - $950. I didn't realize they cut the price again. You'd be crazy to buy anything else.

2x E5 2680 v3 ES - $1260. 24 cores/48 threads of fury.

___________________________
$4,555
 
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I agree with everything above, save for the hard drive.

While he was probably thinking "dump finished products here and forget them", I'm betting the hard drive is going to see more use than that. And ANY load more than the occasional "dump and leave" tends to make these archive drives run REALLY hot and die.

If you want reliable-ish storage. But don't really want to fuck around with provisioning your own NAS or something.

Drobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822240112
3x 4TB HGST Deskstar: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145912
 
Not sure if you read I am getting the Synology 8bay so a drobo is not what I am planning on.

Also I don't plan on dumping anything and forgetting about it.

The internal drives are for maximum performance... i.e. Scratch disk, render from, render to, and OS.


Chris: Thanks..
For the 8TB I know, but it's literally just ANOTHER backup of all the files, just in case
GTX960... for the little bit of extra money would it make sense to go with the 970 or 980?
64GB ram is probably plenty for now.

I am NOT familiar with Xeon and those types of motherboards or any of their parts, so please forgive me. I am guessing a multiple processor makes the most sense here though. Is there a better case for all this hardware?

Those 850's make sense for the render to and from as well as the 750 for initial rendering..

Thanks for the feedback. Again I have no experience with Xeon so I am guessing I have to buy off Ebay or the like correct? Mind giving me a couple different options to continue to look out for them.

Thanks
Ryan G
 
I agree with most of Chris_Londardo's suggestions other than

1. Do not get a Seagate 8 tb archive HD. Stick with WD Reds or HGST Nas or WD Black if you need the speed.

2. Kingston is not on Supermicro's approved memory list. I am running Hypernix ram in my Supermicro Workstation. Micron is also on their approved list.

Not a fan of Drobo. If you just need a NAS I would probably go with the Synology.

I am running a dual opteron box I picked up used on the cheap as my NAS and ESX box was cheaper then a Synology and has 24 bays. I have WD Reds array for work storage, HGST for virtual machine raid array. Electric bill is worse then a NAS box but I have virtual machines on it.

Not much point in getting anything more then a GTX 960 unless you are playing games or you are GPU renders that require more then 2 GB of ram.

I am running dual xeons and all solid state for OS, render and scratch.

2680v3s are probably the sweet spot for price/performance right now. Just as the 2680v2s was the sweet spot when I built my box last year.
 
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Kirika said:
I agree with most of Chris_Londardo's suggestions other than

1. Do not get a Seagate 8 tb archive HD. Stick with WD Reds or HGST Nas or WD Black if you need the speed.

2. Kingston is not on Supermicro's approved memory list. I am running Hypernix ram in my Supermicro Workstation. Micron is also on their approved list.

Not a fan of Drobo. If you just need a NAS I would probably go with the Synology.

I am running a dual opteron box I picked up used on the cheap as my NAS and ESX box was cheaper then a Synology and has 24 bays. I have WD Reds array for work storage, HGST for virtual machine raid array. Electric bill is worse then a NAS box but I have virtual machines on it.

Not much point in getting anything more then a GTX 960 unless you are playing games or you are GPU renders that require more then 2 GB of ram.

I am running dual xeons and all solid state for OS, render and scratch.

2680v3s are probably the sweet spot for price/performance right now. Just as the 2680v2s was the sweet spot when I built my box last year.
Click to expand...
I ran 128gb of Kingston DDR3 on my X9DAi. Approved lists can only be so extensive- things like RAM specs are fairly prescriptive, but fair point.
 
vidoprof said:
Not sure if you read I am getting the Synology 8bay so a drobo is not what I am planning on.

Also I don't plan on dumping anything and forgetting about it.

The internal drives are for maximum performance... i.e. Scratch disk, render from, render to, and OS.


Chris: Thanks..
For the 8TB I know, but it's literally just ANOTHER backup of all the files, just in case
GTX960... for the little bit of extra money would it make sense to go with the 970 or 980?
64GB ram is probably plenty for now.

I am NOT familiar with Xeon and those types of motherboards or any of their parts, so please forgive me. I am guessing a multiple processor makes the most sense here though. Is there a better case for all this hardware?

Those 850's make sense for the render to and from as well as the 750 for initial rendering..

Thanks for the feedback. Again I have no experience with Xeon so I am guessing I have to buy off Ebay or the like correct? Mind giving me a couple different options to continue to look out for them.

Thanks
Ryan G
Click to expand...
Have a look at the other Supermicro barebones for case options, or just look at EATX cases with power supplies that support the EPS12V standard. You'll need EPS12V support to run dual CPUs on both boards.

Xeons are absolutely the way to go for you- video editing/encoding is infamously CPU-bound. Just look on eBay or Taobao (with Google Translate on + then use TaobaoNow as a shipping agent, since Americans can't easily buy directly from Taobao) for "Xeon E5 v3 ES" to locate suitable options. You should probably look up some specific benchmarks to see whether you'd benefit from more cores or more clock speed, but the 2660 V3, 2670 V3, or 2680 V3 are great workhorse CPUs for most professionals.

If you use effects that benefit from GPU acceleration, the sure, spring for a faster GPU. If it were me and I had budget, I'd stick with the 960 and get a second Intel 750 in RAID 0.
 
vidoprof said:
Not sure if you read I am getting the Synology 8bay so a drobo is not what I am planning on.
Click to expand...

Damn. Why the fuck do I miss important things like that?

If that's the case, you don't really need the 8TB drive at all then..

Chris: Thanks..
For the 8TB I know, but it's literally just ANOTHER backup of all the files, just in case
GTX960... for the little bit of extra money would it make sense to go with the 970 or 980?
64GB ram is probably plenty for now.
Click to expand...

You might see some gains due to GPU Acceleration. But only in a limited subset of functions and only when using the Develop model.

Basically, so long as the card has enough memory to handle a big 4K frame buffer, you're probably good as is.

I am NOT familiar with Xeon and those types of motherboards or any of their parts, so please forgive me. I am guessing a multiple processor makes the most sense here though. Is there a better case for all this hardware?
Click to expand...

http://ark.intel.com/products/81908/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2680-v3-30M-Cache-2_50-GHz

They are 2.5Ghz (3.3Ghz Turbo frequency when using low numbers of cores and within thermal limits), 12 core Hyperthreading (showing 24 cores) CPUs.

New, they go for about $1800 a pop. But a bunch are showing up on eBay as server pulls.

Basically, with a dual-CPU rig, you'd be able to crunch 48 threads.

Now, granted, most of the programs you use quite simply aren't going to use ANYWHERE near that many threads. But, still, if you're working on a lot of items in parallel, these CPUs can make sure you pretty much ALWAYS have "grunt" to spare.


Thanks for the feedback. Again I have no experience with Xeon so I am guessing I have to buy off Ebay or the like correct? Mind giving me a couple different options to continue to look out for them.

Thanks
Ryan G
Click to expand...

If you have questions about a particular type of CPU, drop it into Google. Usually the very first link will be to the Intel ARK site, giving you all the blood and guts info on the CPU.
 
Thanks again everyone. I really appreciate it.

I will be checking Ebay for the server pulls cause $1800 a pop is going to blow my budget it looks like. :)

Ryan G
 
vidoprof said:
I know the Synology 8bay is ~$1,000 without drives and populating it with (8) WD Black 4tb drives is roughly $240 each so another $1900. So the $2900 is NOT in the $5k - $6k budget. Would the Synology 8bay for data storage - (8) WD Black 4tb drives or would RED be better as it's just data storage?
Click to expand...

use WD REs if you want 4tb drives, ignore any other sugestion, they are nearly indestructible and worth every penny of the extra cost, comes in sata & sas (WD4000FYYZ & WD4001FYYG). for cpu only xeons will do what you want, i could help you but im only interested in itx toys sorry :p
 
vidoprof said:
Thanks again everyone. I really appreciate it.

I will be checking Ebay for the server pulls cause $1800 a pop is going to blow my budget it looks like. :)

Ryan G
Click to expand...


Good luck. If you wind up having to buy new, maybe look at the

Exon E5 1650 v3

http://ark.intel.com/products/82765/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-1650-v3-15M-Cache-3_50-GHz


Hex core, 3.5/3.8 Ghz (Standard/Turbo). Would give you 12 cores and 24 threads (which should still be a hell of a lot of grunt, and doing it roughly 30% faster than stock-speed 2680's.
 
vidoprof said:
Thanks again everyone. I really appreciate it.

I will be checking Ebay for the server pulls cause $1800 a pop is going to blow my budget it looks like. :)

Ryan G
Click to expand...

The ES CPUs I keep talking about are engineering samples. They're pre-production chips that (typically with C0 or later steppings) work just the same as the super-pricey official versions. Intel sends out thousands of these things to manufacturers for validation, and then they land on the gray market.

If you spend $1800 on an ES chip, you're probably doing it wrong. But then, I've seen ES Xeons go for $1200 that are the equivalent of the $4,000 SKUs.

For what you need, I stand by it being a no-brainer. When's the last time you needed to RMA a CPU under warranty anyway?

In terms of figuring out what Q-codes (models/revisions) are best, there's a list going around the DC forum here, and some extremely knowledgeable people on the #hardfolding IRC channel.
 
Chas said:
Good luck. If you wind up having to buy new, maybe look at the

Exon E5 1650 v3

http://ark.intel.com/products/82765/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-1650-v3-15M-Cache-3_50-GHz


Hex core, 3.5/3.8 Ghz (Standard/Turbo). Would give you 12 cores and 24 threads (which should still be a hell of a lot of grunt, and doing it roughly 30% faster than stock-speed 2680's.
Click to expand...

You cannot use this in a dual CPU configuration. It goes by model number: Xeon 1xxx are for single CPU systems, 2xxx for dual CPU, 4xxx for quad CPU, and 8xxx for 8 CPU configs.
 
So a couple things changed.. "The Boss" is allowing a $2500 - $3000 budget now (not including the synology and drives)...

Should I go back and redo another thread with the update OR just go back to the top of THIS thread and redo it?

I think I would like to stay mainstream mobo and cpus also.. just for piece of mind..

Thanks
Ryan G
 
I just build 4 i7-5820K systems, rock solid with the Asus X99-A mobo's. It's a budget option for a workstation, but performs great. I would also look at Quadro GPU's for video editing.
 
I'm not sure if you will need a dual CPU config.. I can't possibly imagine you not being satisfied with some like a 6 core X99 build. Sure, the Xeons have the capabilities of processing way more data, it all depends on what you can get for how much money. As for the GPU, a GTX 960 does support 4k resolution, but it isn't exactly a workhorse or capable of anything semi-gpu intensive at 4k resolutions. The HDD's get WD RE drives, they are worth the money. I believe that is the "best" 4tb you can get for this application.
 
Ryankirsch13 said:
I'm not sure if you will need a dual CPU config.. I can't possibly imagine you not being satisfied with some like a 6 core X99 build. Sure, the Xeons have the capabilities of processing way more data, it all depends on what you can get for how much money. As for the GPU, a GTX 960 does support 4k resolution, but it isn't exactly a workhorse or capable of anything semi-gpu intensive at 4k resolutions. The HDD's get WD RE drives, they are worth the money. I believe that is the "best" 4tb you can get for this application.
Click to expand...

I'm running an i7 5930K, and still find myself fairly CPU limited when working with 4K video. It just doesn't have the power.

Gaming at 4K != editing at 4K. A GTX 960 is more than enough, unless he is a heavy user of GPU-accelerated effects.
 
Not much as far as effects go..

Just curious.. Is the higher end CPU (5960) that much better for that much more? I would rather NOT spend the extra money unless it would REALLY make a difference.
 
What version of After effects are you running? I am still on 2014 because 2015 is bad for multi core.

Puget Systems did some tests with After Effects 2014 and Multicore performance.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-After-Effects-CC-2014-Multi-Core-Performance-716/

I felt it was worth it to build a dual xeon system and I am not even doing 4k work yet.

You can get 2 es xeons for not that much more then a new 5960. Chris_Lonardo's build if you remove the archive hard drive, intel 750 and drop the ram to 32 gb is about 3000. You can cut ram costs by buying server pulls off of Ebay.

I would not get Windows 10. I am running 8.1 enterprise.
 
Thanks for the insight.. I appreciate it.

I am open to that dual xeon system.. I guess I will have to look back at this again and see what I can do.

I am running after effects 2015 (as I already upgraded sadly). All my Adobe apps are on the latest versions. The good thing is I don't really use After Effects much at all, except for intro and outtro logo reveals where it runs just fine.

I would probably install Win 7 Ultimate on the system personally as It's rock solid. I still fear Win 10 right now, until Adobe and MS get their acts together.

Ryan G
 
Henri108 said:
I just build 4 i7-5820K systems, rock solid with the Asus X99-A mobo's. It's a budget option for a workstation, but performs great. I would also look at Quadro GPU's for video editing.
Click to expand...

Care to give me your specs on your machine.

Thanks
Ryan G
 
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