Input on a PC Build for Video Editing

[Vincent Anthony]

Hello folks. I am looking for some input regarding a PC build geared toward video editing. It is based on the build outlined by the VideoGuys. I have built 2 normal PC's in the past, but nothing this robust. Would really appreciate someone with more experience having a look and making any suggestions for changes you think would help. I am trying to keep this in the area of $1500 to $2000.

The aspects of the build that I need to work out are following:
1. how to set up Raid Storage drives inside the tower rather than going with the external unit below. Is it best to go 4x 1TB drives or 2x 2TB drives? Also, what type of controller is best for speed.

2. Whether to go with the Antec Mid Tower or Full Tower case, and what type of cooling accessories to purchase.

3. Compatibility of all the parts and the Power supply - is this large enough?

4. To go with an SSD for the boot drive or have the extra storage a normal 1TB 7200 rpm drive will provide.

5. Video cards -- just too many options it seems

While I am careful at assembly, I am sure my questions show that there are large gaps in my knowledge of this type of system.

Newegg parts list:

Case: Antec Nine Hundred Two V3 Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Gaming Case

SSD Boot Drive:
Crucial M4 CT256M4SSD2 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive

CPU: Intel Core i7-3820 Sandy Bridge-E 3.6GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 2011 130W Quad-Core Desktop Processor

Graphics Card Candidates:
EVGA 012-P3-2078-KR GeForce GTX 560 Ti - 448 Cores (Fermi) Classified Ultra 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

EVGA 025-P3-1579-AR GeForce GTX 570 (Fermi) HD 2560MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

EVGA 012-P3-1570-AR GeForce GTX 570 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

Motherboard: ASUS P9X79 PRO LGA 2011 Intel X79 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with USB BIOS

PSU: CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX750 V2 750W ATX12V v2.31/ EPS12V v2.92 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC High Performance Power Supply

RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9Q-16GBXL

Bluray Drive: Pioneer Black 12X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 5X DVD-RAM 10X BD-ROM 4MB Cache SATA BDXL Blu-ray Burner BDR-207MBK

[Noa Put]

You forgot to mention THE most important part; what NLE will you be using, you always have to build your pc based on your NLE requirements.

[Edward Carlson]

I really like SSDs as boot drives. A recent build I did with an SSD boot drive starts up in about 20 seconds, from cold to completely ready to go.
Google for "power supply calculator" when you get all your parts spec'd out to determine how many watts you need. I recommend a modular power supply to get rid of the unnecessary cables.
Some motherboards support RAID right from the onboard SATA ports, but you can also get RAID cards. I recommend an internal RAID backplane so you can swap out the drives easily.

[Vincent Anthony]

Originally Posted by Noa Put

You forgot to mention THE most important part; what NLE will you be using, you always have to build your pc based on your NLE requirements.

I will be using the Adobe Premiere and After Effects CS6

[Edward Carlson]

I would recommend a powerful graphics card then, since Adobe Media Encoder uses your GPU to accelerate encodes. Or if you're up for it, two cards with CrossFire or SLI.

[Alan Craven]

Sandy Bridge E is fussy about memory. You would be better to use GSkill Ripjaws Z which is specifically designed for the X79 chipset.

You may need to go to 32GB of RAM to cope with Premiere + AE, depending on the material you edit and the complexity of your sequences.

The motherboard you have chosen allows you to have RAID arrays on both Marvell and Intel ports. With a similar motherboard I have a RAID0 array on both Intel and one pair of Marvell ports, used for E:\ Media, and F:\Cache plus storage. I back up regularly to an external drive. This system works well and is fast.

If you propose adding a RAID array to the Intel ports at some stage, you MUST enable RAID in the BIOS BEFORE installing Windows. If you do not and try to enable RAID later, Windows will become unbootable, and you probably will not be able to reverse this. Thios applies even though the drive on which Windows is intalled is not a RAID array, and there are no RAID arrays in the system at this point. You will need the Intel RAID pre-install driver on a USB stick to install using the F6 method as Windows itself does not include an appropriate driver.

Depending on how many drives you propose to install in your case, you may need a power supply rated at more than 750W.

[Jeff Pulera]

A couple of things -

1) Premiere does not utilize dual GPUs

2) You could simply create a Windows RAID 0 stripe set, if working with the usual 25Mbps codecs

Jeff

[Vincent Anthony]

Originally Posted by Alan Craven

The motherboard you have chosen allows you to have RAID arrays on both Marvell and Intel ports. With a similar motherboard I have a RAID0 array on both Intel and one pair of Marvell ports, used for E:\ Media, and F:\Cache plus storage. I back up regularly to an external drive. This system works well and is fast.

Alan, I like the sound of that. It seems a little simpler than what I mentioned and I also currently back up everything to an external drive. So as I understand it you have a boot drive and 2 RAID0 drives that you use for media storage and cache + storage.

Could you tell me what type of drives/size you're using? It sounds like this may be a good method for me to adapt my build to as it will keep things cleaner. Also, what do you use for a boot drive and are any other parts necessary for connecting the drives to the MB above?

[Trevor Dennis]

Vincent, if you are using Prem Pro, then check out the PPBM5 results table, and specifically how the various systems are spec'd, and where they are placed in the table.

Benchmark Results

Hmmm... Just noticed my system is still placed 14th, and it is >10 months old now, but if you take a look at the News page, there appear to be performance issues with CS6.

Latest News

That's interesting, and something I was not aware of.

[Alan Craven]

Originally Posted by Vincent Anthony

Alan, I like the sound of that. It seems a little simpler than what I mentioned and I also currently back up everything to an external drive. So as I understand it you have a boot drive and 2 RAID0 drives that you use for media storage and cache + storage.

Could you tell me what type of drives/size you're using? It sounds like this may be a good method for me to adapt my build to as it will keep things cleaner. Also, what do you use for a boot drive and are any other parts necessary for connecting the drives to the MB above?

I have a 256 GB Crucial M4 as C:\
2 x 750 GB WD Caviar Black in RAID 0 as E:\ for media (captured HDV and copied AVCHD)
2 x 1TB WD Caviar Black in RAID 0 as F:\ for media cache and Encore projects.

In addition I Have a 500 GB WD Scorpio as D:\ for all non-video editing files plus video projects, and a 3 TB Seagate Barracuda as G:\ for Video exports and storage/backup. These are not really necessary for a good editing system

I use a second 3TB Barracuda for backup of all video files in an external eSATA case.

The only additional parts that I used for assembly were a set of latching SATA cables for security, particularly with the RAID0s, rather than the rather flimsy ones that came with the motherboard . My Lian-Li PC90-B case takes 2.5" drives or 3.5" drives without modification.

there are faster drives around now than the Crucial M4.

[Noa Put]

Bear in mind that if you plan to use WD disks in a raid environment and when working with critical data you need to go with the enterprise versions which have TLER and use a enterprise class RAID controller that is compatible with those disks, without TLER in the worst case you could end up loosing all your data if one of your drives in an array is doing error recovery from a bad sector. Best to use a raid 5 that can reconstruct your data if a drive fails. If the data you are working with is important and not recoverable if a drive fails then it's best to not build a raid 0 using the motherboards raid controller.

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Vincent Anthony

I will be using the Adobe Premiere and After Effects CS6

I suggest you go over to the adobe forums and show your system setup there, Premiere is one of the few NLE's out there that requires a specific setup to function optimally which is why I asked what NLE you used.

[Alan Craven]

Originally Posted by Noa Put

Bear in mind that if you plan to use WD disks in a raid environment and when working with critical data you need to go with the enterprise versions which have TLER and use a enterprise class RAID controller that is compatible with those disks, without TLER in the worst case you could end up loosing all your data if one of your drives in an array is doing error recovery from a bad sector. Best to use a raid 5 that can reconstruct your data if a drive fails. If the data you are working with is important and not recoverable if a drive fails then it's best to not build a raid 0 using the motherboards raid controller.

The need to use Enterprise grade WD drives in RAID arrays applies to parity RAIDs only. It does not apply to RAID0.

RAID0 provides excellent speed, and with a sensible backup strategy provides excellent Bang-for-Buck. I have used this drive structure for three years without ever having to call on my backup due to a drive failure. Now, as for OE, that is another matter .....

I accept that for many professionals, the need for data security necessitates a different strategy.

[Noa Put]

and with a sensible backup strategy

with raid 0 you better have a backup strategy because if one drive fails all is lost. I don't use a raid setup but try to separate all my data as much as possible with a backup strategy that enables me to recover my OS and programs in minutes and recover my project I"m working on the day that drive would fail. Even in case of a fire and if all would be lost I still have a way (a external disc at my parents house that is being updated every week and especially when I offload new videofiles to my pc.) to recover all my video and projectfiles.

I have here 2 damaged harddrives that my wife used, just stopped working (within a timeperiod of 2 years) and only recoverable in a lab, only my wife doesn't take backup as seriously as I do...

[Vincent Anthony]

Thanks for all the input Alan and Noa.

Ideally, from all my research - I would love to spend a fortune and setup the RAID5 array Noa mentioned.

That's just not feasible for me right now. Alan, I am leaning toward mirroring your setup with the Motherboard and CPU above and minus the SSD to save even more money. Can I ask why you went with the smaller 750GB drives for the media drives? I figure it's either price or the fact that you don't keep media on there longer than you're working on it for - so storage size may not be relevant.

I have the raw files on a separate drive for any video project I am working on, and nothing I've worked on is so critical at this point that I need to the minute backups...although I do see how nice having solid backups would be.