Hi,

I am now in the process of sorting out a new PC (to get CS4 to run!) and need some suggestions on what video card I might use.

I have a budget of approx. £1000 for the new system and seem to have already used this up with the items so far.

- CoolerMaster Elite 330 ATX No PSU Black
- OCZ Technology 500W STEALTHXSTREAM POWER SUPPLY
- Asus P6T DELUXE X58 Socket 1366 7.1 channel audio ATX Motherboard
- Intel Nehalem i7 920 S1366 2.66GHz
- 6x Crucial 2GB 240PIN DDR3 PC3-8500 NON ECC CL-7
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB 7200RPM S300 16MB
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit OEM

I still need to decide on a video card and am slightly bemused by the prices I am seeing. Reading various posts on this forum it seems that the video card does not need to be amazing as I am not needing the 3D part and the system CPU will be doing a lot of the work.

Looking at the Adobe site the CS4 compatibility page shows several Quadro/ATI boards starting at about £300. Do I really need anything this good or can I use something a little more affordable (say sub £100)?

I might consider a Matrox RT.X2 at some stage but that will be when I can afford it. Therefore the graphics card I buy now might be replaced.

I would really appreciate any thoughts on this, I don't want to buy a budget card to find it doesn't work with CS4, I also don't want to waste money on a super 3D gamer card with lots of noisy fans.

Alex

If you are considering a Matrox RTX2 card, then you better check the size of the case you have listed. The Matrox requires a server size case as it is an extended card. Also the Matrox is VERY fussy about which graphics cards it will and will not work with. You should check out the Matrox website re these specifications BEFORE you purchase a case and GPU otherwise you will find yourself spending more dollars (or pounds) down the track.

It is only the RTX2 itself that is extra-long and needs a deep case to suit. If you do not need the output to a dvi monitor, then the RTX2-LE will be fine, and is the conventional length.

Whatever graphics card you get, it MUST have at least 512 MB of memory, or some of the effects will not work properly. The ATI 4850 graphics card gives excellent results for a moderate cost. I use a Gigabyte card, which has no fan.

Alex, any budget video card that can do OpenGL will be fine. I have an old GeForce 8600GT and it works just fine. PPro only has a precious few GPU-aware effects... so spend your money on some other nice bit of kit.

From my experience, video editing and rendering relies most on the CPU, then the disk subsystem, then the RAM. Waaay down the line is the lowly video card... at least until you pony up big buck$ for realtime cards, like the RTX2.

HTH,
Brian Brown

The ATI 4850 graphics card gives excellent results for a moderate cost. I use a Gigabyte card, which has no fan.

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the info. Just to be clear are you using the 4850 with Vista and CS4? If so could you give me a link or product code as I seem to have found thousands of variations of this card (most with fans).

Cheers

Alex, any budget video card that can do OpenGL will be fine.

Thanks Brian,

So how comes they list 'compatible' card on the Premiere CS4 page? Do you know what the difference between a ATI4850 (as Alan suggested above) and a budget OpenGL or even a top dog £500 job?

I am a little confused as to what difference this all makes especially as I see some people on this forum with some quite meaty cards.

Something like this?

GV-R485MC-1GI GIGABYTE ATI HD4850 1GB 256BIT DDR3 PASSIVE NATIVE HDMI PCI-E GRAPHICS CARD (http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop/index.pl?prodID=B219295#)

That is the one! I bought mine from Scan.

I'm sticking to XP3, and I have the Matrox RTX2LE with Premiere CS4, using an Asus P5K Premium WiFi deluxe board with 4Gb of Corsair 1066 memory.

There are problems with CS4 still, but the Adobe Media Encoder and Matrox driver patch with appeared ten days ago made things a great deal better! In particular exports from the timeline to Matrox .avi are now very fast, as the new Matrox driver uses the processing power of the card for acceleration.

If you work on sections at a time in separate projects, then combine the exported avis into the finished project there are few freezes, and hardly a crash. It does seem to me that exporting is the problem area.

Thanks everyone for your help. I have now ordered by new CS4 machine whish is as follows:

- CoolerMaster Elite 330 ATX No PSU Black
- Corsair Memory 650W TX SERIES ATX
- Asus P6T DELUXE X58 Socket 1366 7.1 channel audio ATX Motherboard
- Intel Nehalem i7 920 S1366 2.66GHz
- 2x Corsair Memory Corsair 6GB 1333MHz DDR3 CL9
- GIGABYTE ATI HD4850 1GB 256BIT DDR3 PASSIVE NATIVE HDMI PCI-E
- Western Digital CAVIAR SE16 250GB 16MB SATA/300 7200RPM
- Samsung SH-S223F Internal 22x DVD Writer Drive SATA (Black)
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit OEM

I hope this all is ok. If anyone can see any issues I would appreciate you letting me know as I can still make changes until 2:30pm tomorrow (UK time).

Thanks again.

If you intend to do any multi-tasking (like with the Adobe CS4 Suite), I'd bump up your RAM to 8GB to really take advantage of your OS.

Also, the 10k rpm WD Raptor drives make a super-speedy system drive.

Otherwise, your specs look great.

I agree with having the VelociRaptor for the C drive, and add a recommendation to also get 2 x 1TB drives in a RAID-0 config for working with data files (but NOT for long term storage).

Unless you are SURE you will never want to burn or play BluRay discs, perhaps change out the DVD player with a BluRay burner. It isn't much more money to add that capability.

If you're not really an overclocker, your choice for the 12GB of RAM is excellent. Hardcore overclockers might suggest getting 1600 RAM rather than 1333.

All that said, without changing a thing you'll have a fast system!

The one thing I would look into is getting one of the 12 GB kits that corsair sells either the HX3X12G1600C9 or HX3X12G1600C9. I asked the same question on theCorsair forum for my new system and they recommended the HX3X12G1600C9. Here is what my newest bestest friend Derekt said:

"Binning is testing memory at the Integrated Circuit Level and at the finished module level to be certain that the kit will run at the given full speed. Running with 6 modules puts a greater demand on the Integrated Memory Controller situated on the CPU. For this reason, often when people purchase two single kits of memory, they must drop the speed, ie. 1600 --> 1333Mhz, 1333 --> 1066Mhz to find stabilty. The 6 module kit goes through a far more rigorous testing (binning) for higher quality responses.

You certainly could buy two sets, but you might well have to drop the DRAM speed to attain stability. So if you bought 2 of 1600C9 (3 module kits) you might have to drop the speed to 1333Mhz to gain stability. The 6 module kit has been tested and validated (Binned) to run at the given speed in the full kit. "

Unfortunately no one seems to have the HX3X12G1600C9 at the moment but was told they would be available any day. If you want to stick with the 1333 speed ram I see that kit is available at various vendors and may save you money and hair pulling when it comes time to set up your ram, wondering why you cannot get it to run at 1333.

Other than that it all looks very nice.

Good Luck!

If you intend to do any multi-tasking (like with the Adobe CS4 Suite), I'd bump up your RAM to 8GB to really take advantage of your OS.

Also, the 10k rpm WD Raptor drives make a super-speedy system drive.

Otherwise, your specs look great.

Thanks Brian,

Aren't the Raptors rather noisy? Its just that I want to keep my system fairly quiet if possible. Also the drive I had in mind is £40 rather than £120ish for the Raptor. I can see why these would be better, its that I have already gone over my budget by 10% so might have to stop now. Just a though but is it possible to fit the OS on a 30GB drive?

I can see that the new http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop/index.pl?origin=gbase16.4&prodID=B128360 looks very cool and quieter than the older drives too, but at £230 I might need to do this as a later upgrade.

Don't worry I have ordered 2 x 6GB giving me 12GB which is the max I can have on that board. That should do the trick...

Unfortunately no one seems to have the HX3X12G1600C9 at the moment but was told they would be available any day. If you want to stick with the 1333 speed ram I see that kit is available at various vendors and may save you money and hair pulling when it comes time to set up your ram, wondering why you cannot get it to run at 1333.

Other than that it all looks very nice.

Good Luck!

Thanks for the info. I found some in the uk at http://www.awd-it.com/scripts/prodview.asp?idproduct=5359 and am just about to order them. Thanks for the advice.

I agree with having the VelociRaptor for the C drive, and add a recommendation to also get 2 x 1TB drives in a RAID-0 config for working with data files (but NOT for long term storage).

Unless you are SURE you will never want to burn or play BluRay discs, perhaps change out the DVD player with a BluRay burner. It isn't much more money to add that capability.

If you're not really an overclocker, your choice for the 12GB of RAM is excellent. Hardcore overclockers might suggest getting 1600 RAM rather than 1333.

All that said, without changing a thing you'll have a fast system!

Cheers Pete.

Good advice. I think that I might stick with the cheaper, bigger drive for now and then upgrade later if needed (run out of money now...).

At the moment I have 2 USB2 Buffalo duo drives (configured in mirror safe mode) and an external eSata2 drive. I havn't really given much thought to how I might configure them now but i was thing something like:

Internal SATA2 drive - OS & Apps
External eSATA2 drive - Current projects
External USB2 Buffalo Duo1 - Backup1
External USB2 Buffalo Duo1 - Backup2

I have read various posts about putting project files on one drive and source media on another but not really reached a conclusion yet. At this stage I am open to ideas. Ideally I don't really want to have to turn three external drives on everytime I open a project as that is going to get quite annoying (and noisy).

I have read about the overclocking options and some people said not to bother with the 1600 memory as it provided little bonus. Looking at Overclocking Intel's Core i7 920 Processor - HotHardware (http://hothardware.com/Articles/Overclocking-Intels-Core-i7-920-Processor/?page=6) they are using 1333 memory on their test bed and appear to have got some pretty impressive results. Still its all a bit scary and I might only go as far as enabling the "Turbo-mode" option making the 2.66GHz into a 2.8GHz.

Hey man,

Definitely let us know how your computer works out for you. I'm about to build a pretty similar one (info in a thread by me in the HD editing forum room) and would definitely like to know how everything comes together.

I think that I read somewhere that with the Nehalem (sp?) processors, it's preferred to have 3 of the same ram cards instead of 2. Would anyone be able to confirm or deny that for me?

Also with overclocking here's an article I found about the i7 920 http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2343395,00.asp paired with the MoBo I'm interested in. They said they were easily able to overclock it to 3.21ghz without breaking a sweat.

Hey man,

Definitely let us know how your computer works out for you. I'm about to build a pretty similar one (info in a thread by me in the HD editing forum room) and would definitely like to know how everything comes together.

I think that I read somewhere that with the Nehalem (sp?) processors, it's preferred to have 3 of the same ram cards instead of 2. Would anyone be able to confirm or deny that for me?

Also with overclocking here's an article I found about the i7 920 Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R Motherboard Review - CPUs, Boards & Components by ExtremeTech (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2343395,00.asp) paired with the MoBo I'm interested in. They said they were easily able to overclock it to 3.21ghz without breaking a sweat.

Hi Alex,

My new PC rocks! I cannot tell you how fast it is and I have yet to use more than 7GB ram...

Everything is quick and responsive. I recently did a HDV shoot and layered up 12 tracks of video with effects (non rendered) and it played real-time without breaking a sweat.

I really cannot fault it. I even managed to make Vista look like XP so I don't know I'm using it

Cheers