Double check my computer build!

[12bass]

If video editing and recording are priorities, Intel offers considerably better performance than anything AMD at the moment. Best by a considerable margin is Core i7, followed by the Core2 quads. Core i7 is the untouched screamer for low latency recording.

 

[kanonfodr]

Buy one small, high-rpm hard drive to run applications and another large one for your data storage.

I did that on my Pandora box, installed a 32gig WD Raptor as my c drive and backed it with an 80gig (this was a few years ago) on d. It was fast but ran out of space for progs quick. I could only have 2 games installed, along with WinXP and a few goodies I used while still keeping space for a swap file.

Today's hard drives are much better with the space/speed equation now, but if he plans to do video editing that will seriously much up hard drive space. I encountered that on my Alienware, a grand total of 180gigs of space on the hard drive.

It's cool, tho. Last night I ordered a pair of Hitachi 320gb 7200 rpm SATA drives last night, along with Acronis True Image. Pretty soon I will be back in the action fierce!

Peace,
Greg

 

[daystcity]

What do you consider high rpm? I ask because if I go higher I get into Velociraptor 10K territory, which is $150.00 plus and I don't want to go there with a hard drive when I can keep my 2 7.2K hard drives and live with the pain. As for the processor, an i7 would be awesome, but I'm not willing to spent between $288-1000 on a processor, and per the core2 quads I hear I will not see a big difference with 2 more processors. Feel free to correct me, but aren't they not used most of the time? I thought only certain special processes could take advantage of a quad core...

Anyway, I'll look into cutting on the hard drives and gaining an extra $40 or so while I research the video card suggestion. Keep in mind I'm pretty much at the top of my budget right now, so 4 gigs of ram might also be in order . Ah well, thank you much for all of your suggestions, comp will probably be ordered next weekend if all goes well. Will be consulting the schools tech club on Tuesday and possibly Wednesday! Can't wait!

 

[12bass]

FWIW, I'd suggest looking up some benchmarks for the various applications that you are thinking of using. Any video encoder which takes advantage of four Intel Q or i7 cores will far outperform an AMD X2 (well over double). AFAIK, even the Core2 Duos (like E8400) are considerably faster than the AMDs, especially in applications like video editing/encoding. From what I've gathered, the newer AMD Phenom II chips have almost caught up in terms of efficiency per clock cycle, but are still not quite equal to the Core2 Quads, and a fair bit behind i7. At this point, I would only consider AMD if making a value-oriented purchase where performance was secondary, as their midrange CPUs do seem to offer reasonable performance for the money, albeit with higher power consumption. This comes from someone who has built almost exclusively AMD systems for the past eight years.....

 

[12bass]

Also, FWIW, I installed a Western Digital 500GB Blue (AAKS) in a client's machine (AMD 64 3000+) recently and found that it offers excellent speed and low noise.... almost 100 MB/s transfer rates. This after replacing a slower, failed Seagate 320GB.... From what I understand, the WD blacks are the best drive currently, unless one wants to move to SSD.

 

[MCBTunes]

I would spend some money on a new processor heat sink and some better fans. it will quiet your rig down quite a bit. Of course this may not be as important for you as it is for me. But it makes a heck of a difference.

The following are good and cheap:
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro PWM
Scythe Fans

For a better heatsink look into a Thermalright, more money though.

I have a fan controller on my machine so I just kill my case fans(or just turn them down) whenever I am going something that isn't generating a lot of heat... like writing this post. and crank them to 11 when I am gaming which is actually quite rare. But PWM fans are the next best thing, as their speeds are controlled by the computer.

You can do a few more things (like cutting out the metal mesh area of the case where the fans go) to quiet your machine down.

 

[Hugh9191]

As mentioned earlier 8 gigs of ram is overkill. If your running 32 bit vista you'll only be able to get 4 gigs of system memory anyway (RAM + Graphics) and with a 1 gig graphics card you'll only see 3 gigs of that ram. I run Vista on 3 gigs of RAM and it runs like a charm. Also 64 bit linux is way off ATM.

There's nothing worse than finding a major piece of hardware is incompatible with linux so check it all is.

If your running those 2 HDDs in RAID 0 then you'll need to back up your files regularly because if ONE of those hard disks dies then ALL of your data is lost. It might be a better option to buy 3 slightly smaller (500 gig) hard disks and using RAID 5. That way you get a faster speed than if your using 1 drive and better data security than if your using 2 in RAID 0. You'll get about 1TB of storage that way.

Don't forget to check your RAID driver is compatible with linux too. Or else you'll have no chance.

Just a few thoughts.

 

[12bass]

A recent article on the benefits of multiple cores: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/multi-core-cpu,2280.html

Video encoding section here: Invalid Link Removed

Note also that the Intel Q6600 used in the article is significantly more efficient per clock cycle than the A64 X2, and even it is three years old.

My rationale for recommending Intel quad cores at the moment is that the substantial increase in performance is worth the relatively modest increase in overall system cost.

 

[daystcity]

As mentioned earlier 8 gigs of ram is overkill. If your running 32 bit vista you'll only be able to get 4 gigs of system memory anyway (RAM + Graphics) and with a 1 gig graphics card you'll only see 3 gigs of that ram. I run Vista on 3 gigs of RAM and it runs like a charm. Also 64 bit linux is way off ATM.

I will be using 64 bit, and about linux, then how am I typing this? Unless you mean it's currently not very good which IME is false. Looking into cutting more and beefing processor, thanks for the link! Very interesting, I will have to research AMD's effeciency however, hmm...

 

[12bass]

Some interactive CPU comparison charts for various applications: Invalid Link Removed