I hope someone can help,

I was about to buy me an i7 2600 3.40GHZ with 4 gigs of RAM with a Radeon HD6450 graphic card for 600 Euros with the hopes of updating the ram and buying a Nvidia card, when I found the pc tower only has 2 ram slots (already in use) and you are only able to put one more internal hard drive.

The other i7 I saw were past 1000 Euros.

Then I saw a AMD Phenom II X6 1055T with 12Gigs of RAM!!! with an ATI HD5750 1 GB, with 2 hot swap hard drive bays and more internal space for disk (I want to put a minimal of 3 internal hard drives) and the cost is 700 Euros.

I have a budget of 600-700 Euros (no more), and I wanted an i7, but the system in that price range is very limited and only 4 gigs like I said, the AMD seems like a very good deal, and can always upgrade with a Nvidia card to be able to use de CUDA in Premiere CS5. It seems clear that comparing the two systems, the AMD is much, much better deal, right?

I was about to buy it (I have to hurry because there are only 3 left), but I wanted to check a little before buying, but in the benchmarks pages, the intel seems to win even though the AMD has 6 chips instead of 4 of the i7, but those pages seems to be more focus in gaming...I want the system for video and photography.

So the question is if the AMD will perform as good (or close to) as a i7 compatible wise? If I buy the AMD will it be a nightmare using it Adobe? At work I have a Dell i7 (don't remember the GHZ right now) bought a year ago with 12 Gigs of RAM (but it costs 1300€) and it goes like a beauty, very smooth.. I wonder if it could be the same using the AMD?

Thanks in advance.

You can function with a Phenom but one would not really say they were "good" for CS5. There have been many postings on this topic. See this one, for example:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/non-linear-editing-pc/490016-amd-cs5-after-effects.html


Basically, the AMD CPUs have limited SSE support, which matters for PPro's encoding to MPEG and H.264. Numbers of postings from Harm Millaard and others, such as Russel Leong, have explained that AMD Phenoms will tend to be as much as twice as slow as I7 systems running Ppro CS5. With CS5 and 5.5, the AMD Phenoms seem likely to be comparable to the performance of Core2 Dueo systems.

If you go to Benchmark Results (http://ppbm5.com/DB-PPBM5-2.php) and select the Phenom series on the Model CPU tab and then select only systems with 6 physical cores, you will see currently 13 results, ranging from rank 195 for an overclocked AMD with CUDA enabled and the best non-CUDA system at rank 326 down to rank 426.

That says it all I guess.

Hello,

Thank you very much for the replies guys, now I know the AMD is a no-no, expecially for not having support for SSE 4.0

To summirize:

1. Get an i7, the i7 2600(K) (not the i7-950/960 because heavy overclocking needed, or the i7-970 because it's too expensive, or the i3 or i5 because of the limit of the cores or multithreading).

2. Get a good ASUS motherboard.

3. Minimal of 12 Gigs of RAM

4. An Nvidia card with 1Gig at least.

5. Don't buy from Dell or other manufacturer and build my own system.

The new doubts are:

a. What model would be a good cheap ASUS motherboard (or what other brand/model)? (what are the specs I should look for) I want the 12 Gigs of Ram and maybe upgrade to 24 Gigs someday.

b. I want the more RAM I can get at a cheap price, so that mean having a lower speed rate...whould this be super-critical? What's the speed I should aim for?

c. For power suply, how many watts minimum?

d. I know liquid refrigeration it's great, but also expensive...but not critical require, right? Air fan is fine if I dont overclocked, correct? But if someday I want to overclock I'll need liquid refrigeration if I don't want the chip to fry?

e. A cheap NVidia Card capable of CUDA? Is it critical to have DDR5?

f. For pc tower I want to able to put at least 3-4 internal hardrive, be able to put some fans for air-flow, but there's some many options I'm overwhelmed, can someone recomend some options.

g. Can I buy a system like that close to 600-700€??? At work I have a Dell (i7 with 12 Gigs of RAM) that costed 1300€ a year ago, so I guess that know it'll be possible to get a much lower price, right? Doesn't have to be top of the line at that price but have the minimun to work fine, like stated: i7, 12 gigs of ram and Nvida card.

h. I know the best deals are in EEUU, but I live in Spain and maybe it's kinda risky to buy in EEUU to have it shiped to Spain or you think it's not???, there have to be closer online-stores to buy here, I have to look...but any suggestions you can make I'll take.

Thanks in advance!

I am not sure how much I can help as I am not in the Euro zone, but here are some suggestions.

"a. What model would be a good cheap ASUS motherboard (or what other brand/model)? (what are the specs I should look for) I want the 12 Gigs of Ram and maybe upgrade to 24 Gigs someday."

An I7/2600K may be a good CPU choice. Randall Leong and Scott Chichelli have postings on it. Check out the PPBM5 website as Harm suggested.

An I7/950 is probably less expensive right now and will be fine for working with CS5 and 5.5. I am running CS5.5 with an I7/950 with 12 g of RAM on an ASUS P6t Deluxe ver. 2 mobo.

I am not "up to speed" on I7/2600k mobos. You might want to start with what Gary Bettan has recently said about the ASUS P8/Z68:

Videoguys Blog - DIY Update: Sandy Bridge - Getting closer with the ASUS P8Z68-V PRO Motherboard (http://www.videoguys.com/blog/K/Sandy+bridge/DIY+Update+Sandy+Bridge+++Getting+closer+with+the+ASUS+P8Z68+V+PRO+Motherboard/0x225799a751fa7ed929c42b46af712285.aspx)

I'm sure others can add to this.

"b. I want the more RAM I can get at a cheap price, so that mean having a lower speed rate...whould this be super-critical? What's the speed I should aim for?"

I remember Randall Leong posting some information about this last spring and you should be able to find it here with a forum search. What I recall him finding was that higher speed RAM does not make a large difference in CS5 performance on many systems and that getting the full benefit of the RAM takes some work. Again, look at the PPBM5 test results to get an idea of the relative benefit of going with higher speed RAM units.

The one thing you do want to look for is RAM sold as a matched set. Again, there are numbers of postings on this which will turn up in a search. Basically, you want to buy a set of 12gb 1333 DDR3 sticks that was packaged by the manufacturer as set. You want to avoid going into a store and just grabbing a random assortment from a parts bin.

"c. For power supply, how many watts minimum?"

750 w is a good safe minimum. You will want hard drives and fans in that case as well as a Blu-ray burner.

"d. I know liquid refrigeration it's great, but also expensive...but not critical require, right? Air fan is fine if I dont overclocked, correct? But if someday I want to overclock I'll need liquid refrigeration if I don't want the chip to fry?"

Stock cooling is fine if you are not overclocking and are careful about buying a well ventilated case, If you do decide to overclock, there are good alternatives to liquid CPU coolers. but leave that research for later.


"e. A cheap NVidia Card capable of CUDA? Is it critical to have DDR5?"

For PPro CS5, you do want DDR5. Depending on what you kind of editing you do and what you are editing, you might find an nVidia GT440 a good choice. Again, there are some recent postings on this.

"f. For pc tower I want to able to put at least 3-4 internal hardrive, be able to put some fans for air-flow, but there's some many options I'm overwhelmed, can someone recomend some options."

CoolerMaster HAF932 is where I would start. There are many favorable postings about it here and elsewhere. Also, you could go to Videoguys.com 800 323-2325 we are the video editing and production experts (http://www.videoguys.com) and look at their "DIY" recommendations.

"g. Can I buy a system like that close to 600-700€??? At work I have a Dell (i7 with 12 Gigs of RAM) that costed 1300€ a year ago, so I guess that know it'll be possible to get a much lower price, right? Doesn't have to be top of the line at that price but have the minimun to work fine, like stated: i7, 12 gigs of ram and Nvida card."

Sorry, I cannot help you here. I know nothing about the European market and do not know how far a Euro goes these days.

"h. I know the best deals are in EEUU, but I live in Spain and maybe it's kinda risky to buy in EEUU to have it shiped to Spain or you think it's not???, there have to be closer online-stores to buy here, I have to look...but any suggestions you can make I'll take."

Other than knowing that EEUU is the Spanish abbreviation for United States, I am at a loss here, as well. I know nothing about Spanish or European equivalents to the likes of newegg.com. The problem I see with buying parts in the US and shipping them to Spain is -- assuming you find a USA/EEUU vendor who ships motherboards to Spain --- there are going to be import duties and taxes which could eliminate the price advantage of buying from a US vendor. You might check with DVinfo sponsor B&H (B&H Photo Video Digital Cameras, Photography, Camcorders (http://www.bhphotovideo.com)) as I believe they ship some electronics into Europe and may be able to explain the process to you.

Hello Jay,

Thanks for the great insights...you got me some starting points to keep searching and see if I can make my buying quest...;-PPP. It's hard to see the incredible deals you have in EEUU (USA) not par with the deals here in Spain...;-(.

Thanks again.

Jose,

Do not be put off by the prices in Spain, you can buy worldwide using the internet.

I just bought some stuff from:

1. New Zealand (camera)
2. China (on camera lighting)
3. Hong Kong (laptop battery)
4. New York (shoulder-mount and on camera lighting)
5. Netherlands (CF cards, filters and camera batteries)
6. Switzerland (camera backpack)

If you look around diligently, you can find nice deals that will save you lots of money. Be aware of shipping costs, however. On the New York deal, it had free shipping in the US but the shipping costs to the Netherlands were exorbitant, so I had that shipped to a USA address and a friend shipped it to me, again saving lots of money.

I also bought the upgrade to CS5.5 Master Collection in the US, because of the huge price difference of the US versus the Netherlands. That alone saved me around € 600. It was a convoluted way because of the manner in which Adobe treats customers from different countries, but it worked.

Hello Harm,

I do have to start buying more stuff worldwide but I now shipping to Spain is a very big hassle for a lot of companies for small clients, not sure why, but it probably has to be because of the import fees that seem kind of oscure, not very clear what kind of rule the use to calculate the prices...to put things worse I live in the Canary Islands which is a kinda special zone and we have diferent taxes fron the mainland and our import fees are even more obscure!!!

But would have to star taking some risk to get better deals.

Later,

Jose

Do you happen to be located near Porto Rico on Gran Canaria?

Hello Harm,

I guess you meant Puerto Rico in Gran Canaria, which is at the southern part of the island, I live in the capital which is not far, around 60-70 km. Why you want to know if I may ask?...;-)))

Just looking for a reliable tour guide for my wife and daughter, who will be there early October. Grin...

No problem, send me a private about the trip details you want to make and try to help you as much as I can...;-)