Building new PC for editing

[Elie]

hi guys, it's been a while since I was in the PC building game and would like a few suggestions.

My last rig was a dual AMD Opteron (yes very old) and would like to upgrade, it's used for video editing and gaming.
I'm moving away from AMD and going for Intel's Core i7, perhaps the 6 core.

So...
1-Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80619i73930K (Is this the best six core CPU out there?)

2-an Intel or Asus motherboard, I am sooo out of touch I have no idea which is good.

3-32GB ram

4-I have an Nvidia 285 GTX with 1GB ram, this is very old now. Maybe an NV 780GTX would work well.

5-Six SATA 3.0 1TB Western Digital black drives and will raid 0 four of them. (Stripe set)

6-Windows 7 pro

Now is the above ok for HD video editing? Or should I got with dual Core i7 quad core CPU's and a workstation class motherboard? Is this over kill?

Thanks guys for your help and opinions.

[Umfriend]

Are you going 4 drive raid-0 for speed? May I suggest going the SSD route? I know nothing about video editing.

[UtwigMU]

Are you going 4 drive raid-0 for speed? May I suggest going the SSD route? I know nothing about video editing.

i 2nd SSD suggestion. You could have one SSD for OS and apps (120 is enough - win7/8 + apps =~ 30GB but 250 is good, 500 is better and 1TB is beyond awesome) and another perhaps for temporary files.

Then use WD drives for bulk storage and large projects.

I recommend 2 in RAID 1 and 4 in RAID 0 is fine.

[Jammrock]

I would get an SSD for boot and a second for a scratch drive. 6 HDDs can't even touch the IO of a single SSD. You still need the HDDs for storage, but if you want to speed up the OS, app and editing you need SSDs.

120GB SSDs are under $100 these days. 240GB drives are around $150-$200.

[Elie]

Good point guys thanks I totally forgot about SSD.

done

[Umfriend]

I would also recommend using few and large HDDs for mass storage. So 1x4TB (assuming external backups will be made) or 2x2TB. Instead of Raid 1 (assuming controllers are still quirky about drive sizes/types etc) I would consider using Drive Pool to manage multiple drives with inherent duplication and single-drive-failure resilience.

[Umfriend]

Oh, and I'm not sure about one SSD for OS and one for Apps and a second for scratch. Sounds so 2002 / Pre SSD world. A single i7-4770 and SSD will already blow your mind when comparing to your existing stuff, except perhaps for transcoding, not sure how much faster that'd be / how old the Opterons are.

[Jammrock]

@Umfriend, an SSD could easily handle the editing IO and the OS and the same time, but SSDs have wear levels. You can only write to a flash block so many times before it dies, and if you're doing heavy video/picture editing that scratch drive is going to be written to a lot.

When it does fail, and it will, you don't want to take out the OS with it. So a 120-240 GB SSD for OS and apps, then a cheap throw away SSD, 64-120 GB, for scratch. Run it into the ground and when it fails just pick up a new cheap drive for scratch.

You may want to do a lot of over provisioning (OP) on the scratch drive as well. SSD performance can plummet if it is constant use with no OP. Though if you give the SSD 3-4 hours of down time a day it will have time to do garbage collection and stay in good shape. You'll want to hit video editor forums to see what people's real world experience is.

[Umfriend]

@Jamm, I see. I still feel though that 2 SSDs would be a waste of money. Assuming that (a) you backup your system regularly and well and (b) one way or another you get the remaining life of the SSD analysed, you'd replace in time and, then, have a spare SSD to really play around with. Of course, I am spoiled with my WHS 2011. I had a crash on a client once and it was back up and running in about 1 hour.

[J1NG]

Since you're thinking of getting the 3960k/4960k. Have you thought about getting another 32GB RAM instead, totallying to 64GB? Eventually putting it into a Ramdisk for video editing and scratch disk?

Assuming Video Editing for you is at least 1080p or 20Mbit/s, that's what? 20 x 60 (sec) x 60 (min) / 8 (bit/byte) roughly 9GB space. You can easily fit in a 3 Hour Video to modify quickly and without needing to thrash any SSD, whilst maintaining 6+GB/s transfer speeds (ie, should be able to keep up with any Video Editing demands).

Also when you get bored, just copy games or anything else into the Ramdisk and have fun launching 12+ clients of a MMO whilst watching 6+ HD Videos simultaneously (graphics and screen limitations of course. )

J1NG

[VJ]

@Jamm, I see. I still feel though that 2 SSDs would be a waste of money. Assuming that (a) you backup your system regularly and well and (b) one way or another you get the remaining life of the SSD analysed, you'd replace in time and, then, have a spare SSD to really play around with. Of course, I am spoiled with my WHS 2011. I had a crash on a client once and it was back up and running in about 1 hour.

It is not only about backup, but about restoring of the system.
I have a single disk for OS, a second one for applications and then additional disks for data. The OS and applications disks are backed up using images (PING: Partimage Is Not Ghost), the data is backed up normally. Having several disks for OS and applications allows the images to be smaller. If I need to restore my OS for whatever reason (disk crash, infection, ...), I can put back the images very fast.
The same can be achieved by having it on a separate partition, but if it is a separate disk, I don't have to worry about messing up the partition table.
So I'm also a big advocate of using multiple disks...

[Umfriend]

That's a different argument alltogether and in the context of this thread you'd actually advise 3 SSDs?.

I'll admit I was never really doing backups prior to WHS 2011. Where do you store your images and how large are they? Why would it be an issue to restore OS/Apps/Data at one single time? As I said, my restore is done within an hour and very simple.

[VJ]

OS and applications can be together (I have the separate due to small disks). Data separate has the benefit that you don't have to restore your data after restoring OS. Images are not too big when compressed with BZ2, but of course still several GBs.
But Jammrock's argument is perhaps more pressing for this configuration.

[Umfriend]

Well, we are, I think, all agreed then that Elie should buy at least one SSD and keep the more static part of his data on huge HDDs (possibly on a NAS or (WHS or SBE) Server. I maintain my position that one SSD for OS/Apps(/Games/Active data is optimal if combined with a sound backup/restore plan.

I really like J1NGs idea about using a ramdisk. Having said that, for one reason or another when I tried it with SQL Server databases it just did not give me the umpf in performance I expected.

[VJ]

The idea for the ram disk is indeed an interesting one... I haven't used them in recent times, but it would be the fastest possible scratch disk.