Will this PC work?

[Ervin Farkas]

Hi friends, I just got a new computer here at work and the company may sell me the old one for around $230. My editing computer is getting old, so I need another one, I was thinking about building the next one... but since this is sooo affordable... I am a total amateur when it comes to hardware, so let me see what you think. This is what I got out of the device manager and opening it up:

Dell model # DHS - not that it matters, it's probably a custom built machine, two and a half years old, typical business PC
ACPI multiprocessor PC
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.0 GHz
1 GB RAM installed, 4 slots total (only 2 used for 2 512 MB sticks)
Disk drive ST340014A
Display adapter NVIDIA GeForce 4MX440 with AGP8x with DVI and s-video output
40 GB hard drive
Samsung CD-ROM SC-148A
Floppy disk drive
IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
- Intel R82801EB Ultra ATA storage controllers
- Intel R82801EB Ultra ATA storage controllers
- Primary IDE channel
- Secondary IDE channel
PS/2 keyboard
PS/2 mouse
Intel PRO/1000MT network adapter
COMM1 communication port
LPT1 printer port
SoundMax integrated digital audio
6 USB ports on back, 2 on front
Windows XP Professional

A second hard drive can be installed instead of the floppy drive
There are 2 empty PCI slots

I need it mostly for SD editing with the Adobe 2 suite, but slowly getting into HDV as well. Video is my side business, so I don't need the latest and greatest, think in terms of "edit at night, render overnight" type situation.

Thanks,

[Herman Van Deventer]

ERVIN /

Try to locate motherboard spec's / Certain motherboard's is just not suitable
for editing / (Chipsets and data transfer through the pci bus ).

Intergrated sound is also not preferrable / A Creative Soundblaster 5.1
or Audighy is a good affordable choice.

The rest seems fine for SD editing. / You can add more HDD & RAM.

For HDV editing however , PPRO combined with Aspect will kickstart you.
Some post's on this forum claim "acceptable " performance even with 2.8 GHZ CPU'S.

Personally I would recommend dual or quad core cpu's.

With a used computer it's dificcult to subject yourself to the unknown
condition by merely lookink at the speck's.

Is there a possibility that you can load Premiere and test it before buying ?

Just trying to help......

Herman.

[Ervin Farkas]

Thanks Herman,

It looks like they are Dell Optiplex 280 machines, some specs are listed here: http://www.ttrents.com/equipment/com...DELL_GX280.pdf.

The chipset is the Intel® 915G Express chipset, Intel® Pentium® 4 processor @ 3.0 GHz with 800 MHz front side bus and Hyper-Threading and 1MB L2 cache.

[Herman Van Deventer]

Ervin,

Intel is fine / Hope everything works out.

Herman.

[Scott Vystrcil]

Originally Posted by Ervin Farkas

A second hard drive can be installed instead of the floppy drive

Just to let you know the connectors for floppies are not the same as IDE. You can't connect a HD in lei of the floppy. :)

[Giroud Francois]

i doubt you can build something good from an old computer (GX280 is a cheap "office use" line). And check the capacitor, this serie suffered of the "chinese capacitor" illness.
the price is too big.
I am currently running HDV cineform from a 2.6 Ghz P4 (overclocked at 3.2Ghz) so it is possible.
My opinion is you better keep the money to invest in a cheap computer but with latest technology (pci-express, new dual core motherboard and processor, fast memory, serial ata drives) than putting 400$ (price of computer+some upgrade ...hard disk, memory ?) in an old computer that has no futur.

[Ervin Farkas]

Actually they dropped the price, it will only cost $190. I won't have to add anything to it except maybe a $10 firewire card, the 40 GB internal drive is enough for the OS and software, I have external drives for storage and 2 GB of RAM sitting in an old AMD 1.6 GHz waiting to be transferred. So my five year old will have a computer of her own for her piano lessons and online coloring :).

Thanks for the cap tip, I will definitely check them out. I am very familiar with this problem as I work on big screen TVs that also suffer from this "disease".