Glad the "apples and oranges" differences are being acknowledged here. Render time comparisons really don't mean anything when two different people are working on totally different projects with different amounts of processing and different render settings, using systems that have more differences than similarities. Meaningful comparisons can only be made when there is ONE variable; all else must be equal. And to begin with, the goal must be stated, as timeline editing performance may be optimized in very different ways than h.264 final renders, for example.

My answer to Dave's original question is that from a performance standpoint, there is no such thing in the desktop market as "overkill" for doing HD work -- you won't edit and say, gee I've got TOO MUCH performance. We could always use faster. How much money you're willing to part with is the main factor. If you're debating with yourself over how much to spend on a video card, start with a cheap one that is certified for use with your editing software, and then see how it goes on your system for your projects.

That's quite a system! You are running all those drives + video card, ram, cpu, etc off of the one power supply ? Even for a 1000w PS, that's got to be a load - especially when overclocking. Do you overclock when rendering?
If I looked at it correctly it looks like a total of 17 Internal Hard Drives
Do all of those drives fit in your case?
What is raid 30?
I have 6 drives, 4 of them set up as a raid 10, or some call it 1+0. "I'm jealous of your system :) Thanks - PK

Paul,

Indeed, I have 17 internal hard disk and it it quite a load on the PSU, so for that reason I use 1 s staggered spin-up. If I use different disk cages, I can go to 21 disks internally, I mean if I run out of disk space...

I usually start with a 3.4 GHz clock speed, when I need to render I increase that to 3.6 GHz or depending on my hurry to even higher.

Raid 3 is somewhat comparable to raid 5, in the sense that there is parity. With raid 3 there is a dedicated parity drive. In my setup I have 6 disks in raid 3. I have two of those raid arrays and these 2 arrays are striped (similar to raid0) to give a raid30. Each array can have one disk failure without data loss and upon replacement will automatically rebuild in the background.

Here is some more info: AC&NC | RAID.edu - RAID Levels - RAID Level 3 - RAID 3

Video Card Replacement - 9500 GT (1GB) vs 220 GT (1GB)
 

Hello Friends. I debated starting a new thread but since this conversation was already in a similar vein, I was wondering if you could help me out. I was running 2x GeForce 9500 Gt video cards each with 1Gb memory. One card was an XFX brand and the other was a BFG brand card. The BFG had a faulty cooler that died while the card was under load and fried the card so I am looking at replacement cards. While looking at the replacement card, XFX GeForce 9500 GT, I came across the XFX GeForce GT220 and am wondering about the difference in switching to a 200 series card. Both cards are 1GB DDR2 cards and I edit in Vegas (primarily) and Premiere(occasionally) so I know GPU's have little to do with these editors. If I go the 220GT route, I will have to order 2 but I am ok with that if it is a better card. I run 1x 21.5" Acer 1080p monitor, 2 Samsung monitors run in a span at 2560x1024, and 1 1080p HDTV from my computer. I don't have slot room for cards that have a 2-slot profile and while I like the heat dissipation bonuses of low profile cards the on-board HDMI with audio seems like it might be a nice option too. Do you guys have any thoughts on this?

Thanks!