My recommendation is plain useless, but here we go: double your budget, the resulting computer will last more than long enough before being well and truly obsolete to make it worth it, and it'll just be more useful.
Cyberlink Powerdirector 11 from what I've read actually supports acceleration using AMD APUs. Pretty sure Sony Vegas Pro can too. Less sure how well Premiere does with that. Yeah, I really think my best advice is wait a week to see the final word on Kaveri. It might actually fit your needs surprisingly well.
Otherwise with the memory prices being so high you'd best consider saving up a bit more. $800 could already make a significantly nicer computer. $1200 might be overkill unless you were turning video editing into some serious business.
I suppose I should share my full thought process here:
I'm trying to figure out a base platform that will serve you best here. A video editing computer does processing on large files that take up a lot of storage and memory and it can take good advantage of both multi-core processors and gpu acceleration. The result is that storage, memory, CPU, and even GPU are all fairly important. A gaming machine, on the other hand, mostly demands a powerful GPU and a fast (but less multi-core) CPU. Memory and storage are less important to a gaming computer, so $600 for a reasonable gaming computer is pretty feasible, while video editing makes this pretty tight since cutting back with a cheaper/smaller hard drive and/or less/slower memory can hurt as bad or worse than sacrificing the CPU/GPU. Video editing gets cut short very fast if you fill up your hard drive, and running short on memory can result in heavy virtual memory usage that turns your hard drive into a nasty bottleneck.
Kaveri should be an OK CPU combined with an OK GPU on a single chip for a relatively low price. Little chance that it will be the greatest choice for a video editing computer (greatest choices come with greatest prices), but with the tight budget it can eliminate the need to cut back too much on memory or hard drives/SSD.
The alternative would be building a computer with a slightly better CPU and GPU combination but purposefully low amount of memory/storage with intentions to add more memory and another hard drive later as an upgrade.
Or try to gather up some extra funds first and do it all at once. "Spend more money" seems like a shitty answer, but those memory prices in particular are scary and I don't know how bad/old your current setup is to know how much it would take to make a worthwhile upgrade.
I use an external hard drive for my video storage. I've been using an HP laptop from 2010 to do my current editing. I wouldn't mind bumping up my budget a bit if it gets me a product that's worth the money.
Haven't forgot about this, but had to fuss over school over the weekend and such. Currently reading Kaveri articles hoping to find some better benchmarks including a wider range of Intel options.
And an HP laptop from 2010...I'm guessing isn't doing you favors. Well I'll check back here later. I've got some review to read and with luck I'll find some good comparisons for video rendering/editing.
With GPU acceleration, this newfangled Kaveri thing does appear pretty respectable for rendering video for a pretty decent price, but the GPU stuff mostly helps manage special effects and filters and such. The FX-8350 at around $200 is still a nice standout and could see further improvement with an added graphics card. Which is good, because it doesn't have any integrated graphics and literally NEEDS to have one (The GPU bench I linked just showed CPU-only numbers again for the FX chips). Downsides to FX: can be a power hog and it's really not a great choice of CPU for games. Unless you are doing a let's play or the like where you're recording your game with live voice-over and such in which case the high core count of the FX-8350 can handle the high-load multitasking without a notable loss of performance. I'm not normally a huge fan of the FX chips, but video rendering and aggressive multi-tasking is a pretty strong point for them. Want a more rounded system? pony up for a i5-4670...
Good specs for a semi decent budget video rendering/gaming rig? $800-1000 I'd say. At $600...it could be done, but you'd probably be getting Kaveri at that price and that's not really a great basis for future upgrades. I'll try to spec out some parts to consider soon.
Geeze Newegg seems slow as hell. I've been trying to dig up some parts for a theoretical semi-decent video editing computer and taking like 15 minutes just to pick out and check out a single product when I might be comparing dozens isn't really reasonable. I don't have literally all day to pick through parts for an example build.
I want to like newegg, but their site is kind of a boneheaded design right now. Checking a checkbox should not initiate an action and definitely not do a page load. That's gotta be generating a LOT of page loads the way this is setup. That just slows the site to a crawl. Dumb.
Ugh. Does nobody know how to design an interface anymore? Apple, Google, Microsoft...they all suck at it these days, so what can I expect?
Definitely. It's a better interface for sure, but it makes some of the same sins as newegg. It just gets away with it because it's less busy and they don't bloat their pages nearly as much.
In any case, I might as well show some parts and thoughts about them that I had scrounged up before giving up on newegg.
CPU: AMD FX-8350
-About $200 on neweegg, probably cheaper elsewhere. It often lags well behind even cheaper Intel chips, but it's still quite fast for video editing in particular. It's about as good as it gets without getting into expensive pro platforms with 12 threaded processors and such and much cheaper as a result of it's poorer performance on many other things as well as it's greater power hunger. It's an old chip at like 2 years old, but still quite good for specific things. A cheaper option: An 8320 or even 6300 are still pretty good at their prices.
Motherboard: ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0
-Sort of a spendy board, but options are growing more sparse for AM3+ socket boards (mATX boards especially) and reviews suggest the cheaper boards are filthy with problems. This is a safer bet that's less likely to be a problem. If you want to try risking a cheaper board some things to look for: Heatsink on the power regulation bits between the socket and the ports, 8-pin cpu power plug (usually at top of board), and...4 ram slots? Asrock is my most trusted cheap brand. I didn't get around to finding some possible decent cheap boards so far.
Power: Corsair CX500
-This is a cheaper, but still respectable, and popular choice. I considered adding a pricier platinum unit but was tired of newegg slowness by then.
Case(s):
-CHEAP: Rosewill
--A cheap newegg house brand case. It's probably a bit flimsy and unspectacular in many ways, but it's cheap, probably functional and the case is about as safe an area as you get to cut costs.
-PROVEN: Antec 300
--This thing has been around in some form for a long time. Still fairly cheap, but it's popular and widely used with few complaints. Still feature-sparse, but a little effort will make most things work out in this case.
-WELL REVIEWED: Corsair Carbide 200R
--Decent reviews for a not-bad price. Still a relatively simple case, but it's got modern systems in mind.
Still needed: Graphics card -Rumors say Feb. 18th launch for a Geforce 750 Ti that might be nice. Currently, good options for modest gaming are probably going to be a 650/650 Ti on the nvidia side, or a 7790/R260 on the AMD side. Usually I shop for version that reviews suggest have good coolers on them. I've seen a fair amount of liking for MSI cards lately on that front. All should work work to benefit video editing, though I think Adobe Premiere required nvidia in the past but seems to be able to use OpenCL for more generic support of everything now. Haven't found good benchmarks to note any current favoritism.
Still needed: Memory -Probably pickup some simple DDR3 1600 memory. pricing is pretty up there and probably staying there for another year. maybe 8GB (2x4GB) now and upgrade to 16 later? Caution around the cheapest choices as usual.
Still needed: storage -An SSD for the OS highly recommended. Pretty much anything Intel is good, or a samsung 840 Pro for top picks, any other samsung drive for cheap if you want safe options. At least 64Gb on that.
Hard drive: 1TB or more, 7200rpm. This is the drive you do your video work on and probably where most programs go. Remember that anything on an external drive is not backed up if that's the only copy you have. Keep at least 2 copies of anything important on different drives and preferably not in the same computer.
Final pricing can easily go well past the $800 mark, but lower cost option can keep it down. This does not include monitor/speakers/mouse/keyboard. We aren't expert corner cutters like the large OEMs. Apples aren't actually overpriced, they are just overly integrated and highly proprietary making them difficult or impossible to repair or upgrade.
Looks like a lot of good options. I'll take a look at your suggestions, and do a bit of research. If I was to go with your suggested motherboard and processor, are there any types of graphics cards, memory, power supplies, etc. I'd be limited to? I'm not entirely sure how this all works together.
Graphics cards are very simple. If it's PCIe (they basically all are) it'll probably work. Just plug in in, boot up, install drivers. Maybe a restart and it's more or less good. Quite possibly the easiest part in a computer to install/replace.
Power supplies are also largely standardized. You generally have a 24 pin main motherboard plug for power with an addition 4 or 8 pin CPU supplemental power plug. 8-pin power plugs are more for power-hungry CPUs while 4-pins are perfectly fine for more mainstream stuff. The majority of graphics cards today also require additional power plugs that or sort of special. Beyond that you'll mostly use SATA power plugs for drives. There's also the 80+ program that most power supplies are part of now that conveniently marks them in broad ranks based on efficiency. There's a certain amount of power loss converting from the 110W at the wall to the 12V that computers largely use. Platinum is basically the top rank, bronze the low. There is also just plain 80+ which is basically not even bronze.
Memory...is a bit more picky as you have different standards, speeds and timings. The main considerations are that you'll need DDR3 as a standard for pretty much all system that have come out since like 2009, speeds vary with which CPU/motherboard you use, though mostly on the CPU these days since all AMD/Intel processors in the past few years have memory controllers built into the CPU. Anyway, 1600 is the speed you'll probably want. In certain configurations it can handle higher speeds, but it'd limit you in how much memory you can use at those higher speeds in this particular case. Don't worry if you do get memory of a higher speed rating because you can run faster memory at lower speeds anyway so no worries there. Also lower CL ratings are better. That's a latency setting. Higher latencies tend to offset the benefits of faster memory so don't think there's that large of a benefit to it. Faster memory does more for the CPU/GPU combo chips with fast integrated GPU bits since the GPUs demand high bandwidth without much latency sensitivity. DDR3 standards call for CL of 11 at speeds of 1600, so if you find something lower, great, but again lots of this memory comes from dubious sources so, don't be too trusting. Then there's voltage. You can probably figure out what that is. The DDR3 standard for voltage is 1.5, but running lower simply save a tiny bit of power, while running higher helps keep memory stable at higher than standard speeds.
Memory also usually runs in a two-channel config. The different colored slots on motherboards show that. You are supposed to plug them in pairs split between channels and that can be a pain trying to find out how they are supposed to plug in sometimes. Also...don't force them in backwards. I had a sister do that once. Line up those notches. RAM used to cost like half or less than what it does now not too long ago. Back then it might not have been a big deal, but now?
Anyway...how about a helpful link. A sponsored, official "how to build a computer" guide. I admit I haven't watched/read it through, but I trust it's pretty spot on and should help if you're unclear about something.
AMD's 8-core isn't always as drool-worthy as you might think. It's pretty great for video editing and a few other things, but there are plenty of cases where a 2Ghz quad core from Intel can nearly match AMD's 4Ghz Octo core.
In other news, there is info out about the Geforce 750 and 750Ti as of today. I still got to read up on it. I guess there's a new Geforce Titan as well, but who spends $1000 on a video card?
I saw that on IGN. I was thinking about what I would need to change to get that card instead, but I'm not sure what exactly the benefits would be other than being slightly cheaper.
I dunno. I wouldn't say it's even cheaper. Performance-wise a 750Ti does seem to hit the level of the 260X reasonably well over all for gaming, but the site I linked showed a Sony Vegas Pro 12 benchmark which suggested that in that case the 750Ti wasn't so grand in at least that case. I suppose a person would have to consult with people more involved in video rendering software to find out what graphics cards are best.
For my own purposes it looks like it could almost run passively judging by the power consumption, and I know I don't run any demanding games that need a high end graphics card and I doubt that's going to change any time soon, so if I was going to buy a new card for myself today, this is what I'd get. I don't render video or anything like that though so there's no question there for me.
As much as the Intel chips do always get slightly better performance, it's still a 4 GHz Octo Core for $200. Where I haven't been keeping up with the prices of computer components recently, that seems ridiculous.
True ridiculousness is realizing that even the new Intel chips spend more transistors on the integrated graphics than on the processor cores. AMD's fusion chips are even more crazy with that. Processes have been shrinking, but they've been rocking quads since like 2007. Processor cores alone aren't that big these days and it's not helpful to just add more so they need to throw those transistors at SOMETHING. The more time goes buy the more powerful those integrated graphics will become. Also they may lump even more stuff into the processors going forward which ends up benefiting mobile devices, though it may not do good things for desktops and the like.
As for 4Ghz? The FX chips have a longish pipeline that helps it hit higher speeds, but it does tend tp cause it to have lower performance at a given speed. The Pentium 4 had similar issues which is why those 3+ Ghz chips all those years ago were soundly trounced by "slower" chips that came later.
Y'know I'm not sure I ever talked about coin mining with graphics cards. I mean it's sort of a thing that people are doing and all the high end radeons have been selling out for non-gaming purposes to the point that prices on them are WAY above MSRP at the actual stores.
Have an article that talks about it a bit in regards to nVidia's new super efficient release. Energy efficiency and cost are big deals for compute projects, especially when they are literally generating money.
Are you insinuating that money is for nerds? It probably is, but then some jock or bully will probably beat them up for it. That what TV tells me anyway.
The new computer is assembled, and edits videos faster than I expected! This is already worth it. Plus, now I get to play Typing of the Dead: Overkill.
NOTE TO SELF: Talk about AMD more because I like being a hopeless AMD fanboy sometimes. Also, a tech company with both an x86 AND an ARM license on top of some high-grade graphics tech? Developing new products mixing all that stuff together? What is that even going to look like?
Comments
Otherwise with the memory prices being so high you'd best consider saving up a bit more. $800 could already make a significantly nicer computer. $1200 might be overkill unless you were turning video editing into some serious business.
I'm trying to figure out a base platform that will serve you best here. A video editing computer does processing on large files that take up a lot of storage and memory and it can take good advantage of both multi-core processors and gpu acceleration. The result is that storage, memory, CPU, and even GPU are all fairly important. A gaming machine, on the other hand, mostly demands a powerful GPU and a fast (but less multi-core) CPU. Memory and storage are less important to a gaming computer, so $600 for a reasonable gaming computer is pretty feasible, while video editing makes this pretty tight since cutting back with a cheaper/smaller hard drive and/or less/slower memory can hurt as bad or worse than sacrificing the CPU/GPU. Video editing gets cut short very fast if you fill up your hard drive, and running short on memory can result in heavy virtual memory usage that turns your hard drive into a nasty bottleneck.
Kaveri should be an OK CPU combined with an OK GPU on a single chip for a relatively low price. Little chance that it will be the greatest choice for a video editing computer (greatest choices come with greatest prices), but with the tight budget it can eliminate the need to cut back too much on memory or hard drives/SSD.
The alternative would be building a computer with a slightly better CPU and GPU combination but purposefully low amount of memory/storage with intentions to add more memory and another hard drive later as an upgrade.
Or try to gather up some extra funds first and do it all at once. "Spend more money" seems like a shitty answer, but those memory prices in particular are scary and I don't know how bad/old your current setup is to know how much it would take to make a worthwhile upgrade.
And an HP laptop from 2010...I'm guessing isn't doing you favors. Well I'll check back here later. I've got some review to read and with luck I'll find some good comparisons for video rendering/editing.
Cyberlink PowerDirector benchmark
- with no GPU acceleration.
- with GPU acceleration.
With GPU acceleration, this newfangled Kaveri thing does appear pretty respectable for rendering video for a pretty decent price, but the GPU stuff mostly helps manage special effects and filters and such. The FX-8350 at around $200 is still a nice standout and could see further improvement with an added graphics card. Which is good, because it doesn't have any integrated graphics and literally NEEDS to have one (The GPU bench I linked just showed CPU-only numbers again for the FX chips). Downsides to FX: can be a power hog and it's really not a great choice of CPU for games. Unless you are doing a let's play or the like where you're recording your game with live voice-over and such in which case the high core count of the FX-8350 can handle the high-load multitasking without a notable loss of performance. I'm not normally a huge fan of the FX chips, but video rendering and aggressive multi-tasking is a pretty strong point for them. Want a more rounded system? pony up for a i5-4670...
Good specs for a semi decent budget video rendering/gaming rig? $800-1000 I'd say. At $600...it could be done, but you'd probably be getting Kaveri at that price and that's not really a great basis for future upgrades. I'll try to spec out some parts to consider soon.
I want to like newegg, but their site is kind of a boneheaded design right now. Checking a checkbox should not initiate an action and definitely not do a page load. That's gotta be generating a LOT of page loads the way this is setup. That just slows the site to a crawl. Dumb.
Ugh. Does nobody know how to design an interface anymore? Apple, Google, Microsoft...they all suck at it these days, so what can I expect?
In any case, I might as well show some parts and thoughts about them that I had scrounged up before giving up on newegg.
CPU: AMD FX-8350
-About $200 on neweegg, probably cheaper elsewhere. It often lags well behind even cheaper Intel chips, but it's still quite fast for video editing in particular. It's about as good as it gets without getting into expensive pro platforms with 12 threaded processors and such and much cheaper as a result of it's poorer performance on many other things as well as it's greater power hunger. It's an old chip at like 2 years old, but still quite good for specific things. A cheaper option: An 8320 or even 6300 are still pretty good at their prices.
Motherboard: ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0
-Sort of a spendy board, but options are growing more sparse for AM3+ socket boards (mATX boards especially) and reviews suggest the cheaper boards are filthy with problems. This is a safer bet that's less likely to be a problem. If you want to try risking a cheaper board some things to look for: Heatsink on the power regulation bits between the socket and the ports, 8-pin cpu power plug (usually at top of board), and...4 ram slots? Asrock is my most trusted cheap brand. I didn't get around to finding some possible decent cheap boards so far.
Power: Corsair CX500
-This is a cheaper, but still respectable, and popular choice. I considered adding a pricier platinum unit but was tired of newegg slowness by then.
Case(s):
-CHEAP: Rosewill
--A cheap newegg house brand case. It's probably a bit flimsy and unspectacular in many ways, but it's cheap, probably functional and the case is about as safe an area as you get to cut costs.
-PROVEN: Antec 300
--This thing has been around in some form for a long time. Still fairly cheap, but it's popular and widely used with few complaints. Still feature-sparse, but a little effort will make most things work out in this case.
-WELL REVIEWED: Corsair Carbide 200R
--Decent reviews for a not-bad price. Still a relatively simple case, but it's got modern systems in mind.
Still needed: Graphics card -Rumors say Feb. 18th launch for a Geforce 750 Ti that might be nice. Currently, good options for modest gaming are probably going to be a 650/650 Ti on the nvidia side, or a 7790/R260 on the AMD side. Usually I shop for version that reviews suggest have good coolers on them. I've seen a fair amount of liking for MSI cards lately on that front. All should work work to benefit video editing, though I think Adobe Premiere required nvidia in the past but seems to be able to use OpenCL for more generic support of everything now. Haven't found good benchmarks to note any current favoritism.
Still needed: Memory -Probably pickup some simple DDR3 1600 memory. pricing is pretty up there and probably staying there for another year. maybe 8GB (2x4GB) now and upgrade to 16 later? Caution around the cheapest choices as usual.
Still needed: storage -An SSD for the OS highly recommended. Pretty much anything Intel is good, or a samsung 840 Pro for top picks, any other samsung drive for cheap if you want safe options. At least 64Gb on that.
Hard drive: 1TB or more, 7200rpm. This is the drive you do your video work on and probably where most programs go. Remember that anything on an external drive is not backed up if that's the only copy you have. Keep at least 2 copies of anything important on different drives and preferably not in the same computer.
Final pricing can easily go well past the $800 mark, but lower cost option can keep it down. This does not include monitor/speakers/mouse/keyboard. We aren't expert corner cutters like the large OEMs. Apples aren't actually overpriced, they are just overly integrated and highly proprietary making them difficult or impossible to repair or upgrade.
Power supplies are also largely standardized. You generally have a 24 pin main motherboard plug for power with an addition 4 or 8 pin CPU supplemental power plug. 8-pin power plugs are more for power-hungry CPUs while 4-pins are perfectly fine for more mainstream stuff. The majority of graphics cards today also require additional power plugs that or sort of special. Beyond that you'll mostly use SATA power plugs for drives. There's also the 80+ program that most power supplies are part of now that conveniently marks them in broad ranks based on efficiency. There's a certain amount of power loss converting from the 110W at the wall to the 12V that computers largely use. Platinum is basically the top rank, bronze the low. There is also just plain 80+ which is basically not even bronze.
Memory...is a bit more picky as you have different standards, speeds and timings. The main considerations are that you'll need DDR3 as a standard for pretty much all system that have come out since like 2009, speeds vary with which CPU/motherboard you use, though mostly on the CPU these days since all AMD/Intel processors in the past few years have memory controllers built into the CPU. Anyway, 1600 is the speed you'll probably want. In certain configurations it can handle higher speeds, but it'd limit you in how much memory you can use at those higher speeds in this particular case. Don't worry if you do get memory of a higher speed rating because you can run faster memory at lower speeds anyway so no worries there. Also lower CL ratings are better. That's a latency setting. Higher latencies tend to offset the benefits of faster memory so don't think there's that large of a benefit to it. Faster memory does more for the CPU/GPU combo chips with fast integrated GPU bits since the GPUs demand high bandwidth without much latency sensitivity. DDR3 standards call for CL of 11 at speeds of 1600, so if you find something lower, great, but again lots of this memory comes from dubious sources so, don't be too trusting. Then there's voltage. You can probably figure out what that is. The DDR3 standard for voltage is 1.5, but running lower simply save a tiny bit of power, while running higher helps keep memory stable at higher than standard speeds.
Memory also usually runs in a two-channel config. The different colored slots on motherboards show that. You are supposed to plug them in pairs split between channels and that can be a pain trying to find out how they are supposed to plug in sometimes. Also...don't force them in backwards. I had a sister do that once. Line up those notches. RAM used to cost like half or less than what it does now not too long ago. Back then it might not have been a big deal, but now?
Anyway...how about a helpful link. A sponsored, official "how to build a computer" guide. I admit I haven't watched/read it through, but I trust it's pretty spot on and should help if you're unclear about something.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2TPW8
Let me know if there are any parts that won't work with each other, and what I could replace them with.
(I'm personally drooling over the fact that you can get an 8 core 4.0GHz processor for $200.)
In other news, there is info out about the Geforce 750 and 750Ti as of today. I still got to read up on it. I guess there's a new Geforce Titan as well, but who spends $1000 on a video card?
For my own purposes it looks like it could almost run passively judging by the power consumption, and I know I don't run any demanding games that need a high end graphics card and I doubt that's going to change any time soon, so if I was going to buy a new card for myself today, this is what I'd get. I don't render video or anything like that though so there's no question there for me.
As for 4Ghz? The FX chips have a longish pipeline that helps it hit higher speeds, but it does tend tp cause it to have lower performance at a given speed. The Pentium 4 had similar issues which is why those 3+ Ghz chips all those years ago were soundly trounced by "slower" chips that came later.
Have an article that talks about it a bit in regards to nVidia's new super efficient release. Energy efficiency and cost are big deals for compute projects, especially when they are literally generating money.
Also: dogecoins are funny.
What is even going on?