Video Editing PC - Budget €1000

choronzonix

Hi all, i'm looking to build a PC for my wife, who does a lot of video, image and sound editing. I last built a gaming rig for myself a couple of years back, so I wanted to see what kind of bang for our buck I can get since then.

1. What is your budget? €1000
2. What will be the main purpose of the computer? Video editing (working with a lot of raw video footage using Adobe Premier), and sound, image editing using, mostly using the Adobe suite

3. Do you need a copy of Windows? No

4. Can you use any parts from an old computer? No

5. Do you need a monitor? Yes, preferably 24" at least and 1080p

6. Do you need any of these peripherals? No

7. Are you willing to try overclocking? No

8. How can you pay? [Bank Transfer/Credit Card/Laser/cash]

9. When are you purchasing? Within the next 3-4 months hopefully.

Digital Solitude

i7 6700 €300
Z170 €100
120gb SSD €60
2tb HDD €90
Case €50
GTX 750Ti €130
16gb RAM €80
300w PSU €40
Monitor €150
Total €1000

Xenoronin

I wonder does it even need the dedicated graphics. It's so hard to find good feedback on if graphics cards are worth it for video editing.

Digital Solitude

I threw it in just in case.

What would you put the money into otherwise? I'd up the SSD and get a 1440p monitor

Xenoronin

Might even look at 4k if she is doing serious video editing, though that may be pushing things a little budgetwise.

Probably more storage to be honest. I still know next to nothing about RAID configurations but Mirroring might be worth it? Or just a decent backup management software.

ED E

GPU acceleration matters depending on what you do/what effects are used. In synthetics its 2x+ faster, real world 5-10% faster, sometimes.

Reserving a scratch space on the SSD and using a regular 2TB disk will be plenty fast.

K.O.Kiki

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 V3 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor (€250.78 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Motherboard: MSI H97 PC MATE ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (€81.98 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: Mushkin Silverline 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (€56.98 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Sandisk Extreme Pro 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€91.99 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Storage: Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card (€126.42 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Case: BitFenix Nova ATX Mid Tower Case (€35.85 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: XFX TS 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (€84.00 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Monitor: LG 24EB23PM-B 60Hz 24.0" Monitor (€189.00 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €917.00
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-05-12 15:43 CEST+0200

Example build with a Xeon 1231v3 (AFAIK Intel iGPU doesn't speed up Adobe software).

Use the 2x 2Tb drives for either RAID or scheduled backup.

choronzonix

Thanks for the suggestions guys, that's really helpful. I think she definitely wants dedicated graphics to help with the heavy lifting during rendering with raw footage.

Eoinmc97

dGPUs will offer some good performance boosts, in certain situations over the iGPU.
To maximise price/performance, you need to cover a lot of bases.

16GB of RAM: Whilst lower timings are apparently helpful here, the difference is negligable. Just get 16GB, as you can always get more (but get diminishing returns)

ANY dGPU with atleast 4GB of GDDR5: Hear me out here. The 750ti definitely offers good price/performance, but when video editing with uncompressable footage, that 2GB VRAM becomes a bottleneck. Does your wife intend to upscale footage to 1440p or more? If so, the 750ti will still speed things up, but any 4GB dGPU will do better at these tasks. If 1080p is the maximum resolution for the near future, stick with the 750ti.

Multiple SSDs and HDDs: I would go with 1 big SSD and 1 HDD at the beginning. The HDD will be used for long term storage, (an external HDD would be a good backup too) and keep finished edits. 1 SSD will keep the OS and the current video prokect you are working on. This would speed up opening and closing of files, micro edits etc, that would save time. Add another SSD for RAID 1 (you lose the storage space, but you get the benefit of parity in case something goes wrong)

CPU with a good amount of single core and multi-core performance: Here is where things get tough. Xeons are good at multi-thread applications, but i7s usuakky beat them in clock speeds. But i7s are a bit costlier.

Soundcard: Sometimes the Realtek ALC on H series or B series are a bit subpar for music and video editing. Don't splurge here, but a €50 Xonar or ASUS should suffice to drive good quality headphones and speakers.


The builds above are good starting points, see if you and your wife can prioritize immediate purchases, and then as time goes on, invest in extras.

Xenoronin

So something like an R9 380 4gb would be a much better choice in this case? Good to know. It's something that's been bugging me for a while. How about those Quattro cards from nVidia? To the best of my knowledge, there is some 10-bit colour thing that is the most tangible benefit, so are they mostly for business applications?

K.O.Kiki

Xenoronin wrote: »

So something like an R9 380 4gb would be a much better choice in this case? Good to know. It's something that's been bugging me for a while. How about those Quattro cards from nVidia? To the best of my knowledge, there is some 10-bit colour thing that is the most tangible benefit, so are they mostly for business applications?

http://geizhals.eu/?cat=gra16_512&v=e&hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&hloc=uk&hloc=eu&sort=p&bl1_id=30&xf=132_4096~131_GDDR5#xf_top

Probably don't need to go all the way to an R9 380; there's R7 370, and some 4Gb versions of the 750ti.

The Xeon 1231v3 I suggest is plenty fast IMHO; 4core (8HT) @ 3.4Ghz with boost to 3.8Ghz.

Soundcard, I suggest looking at external over internal.