@alcomposer

The faster 6 core will be better for most of your routine tasks and with the hyper threading, the 12 virtual cores serve plenty adequate for a majority of things, since lots of RAM, good card, scratch disks etc. also help to balance things out properly. As for the 12 core... it's a lot more money and having 24 virtual cores is kind of overkill for most people, especially considering the fact that not every applications utilize that many, so I've read. As for FCPX, background rendering it's obviously going to take advantage of those 24 cores, but I highly doubt you'd be pulling your hair out with the smaller, faster 6-core...

Originally I was planning on getting the aluminum slab but...apple's just not updating it! Anyways, I saw no harm in getting a bang for the buck PC workstation, and with my Macbook I don't have to ditch my fav. O.S. entirely.

>kind of makes Thunderboltredundant.

Nope.
In fact they use Thunderbolt as intermediary transfer for PCI-E :-)

A quick question related to this topic: I'm having a quite moderate PC, Dual-Core I5-650 with 4GB DDR3 RAM. I'm planning to change my VGA card to something with a passive cooling (budget-one). My question is is there any difference between a radeon card e.g a 6770 and a nVidia card with CUDA? I'm planing to edit footage from my newly purchased GH2 (maybe it'll be hacked). Just some home made work, nothing really serious. Thank You,

Tom

Cool advice. I am about to ditch my ageing pc which allowed me to try out some bits to see what made a difference. Nvidia cards do make a difference - and the other thing which hugely increased my pc's speed was installing an SSD drive. Anyway good luck - it's an adventure!

Yes, I get that, but what's on a dual core i5 @ 3.2Ghz? Does it count anything? Or is it worth to use Premiere at all? If I understand well, only Adobe Premiere could benefit from CUDA, do You recommend to use that software for basic editings or something else?

Base principle - NLE first choice! Then - choice hardware. I recommend to choose NLE firstly.

@Macalincag That's similar to the system I'm buying - although I've gone for a GTX580. Looking forward to getting it - and I've bought a few bits and pieces in advance of it including that SSD boot drive which makes an amazing difference even in my old Q6600 quad core. You also gain because they don't need cooling of course. I also render (Vegas) to the SSD and that seems to work well. Haven't tried RAID but great suggestion. Holding off doing any serious editing till I get my new machine. Can't wait - and hope it's more exciting than watching things render at 1 frame every 3 seconds - although that teaches you zen-like patience.

Am I right in thinking the 3930K runs pretty well without having expensive cooling? Mind you I'm in a cold house so it might be useful to keep my feet warm.

@Macalincag Fab!! Can't wait to get mine going!!

Hackintoshes are nice if you don't plan on constantly updating the O.S. every time they're released as that usually introduces new issues; especially if you don't have the perfect configurations for them- they're plenty of guides out there for that. You usually have to plan ahead before you make a commitment and buy parts. I know for the new x79 platforms I don't think anyone has gotten Lion to run perfectly smooth on then, i.e. no sound, power management issues etc. Best alternative is to have both a mac and a PC as that seems to be working out well for me.

I'm chiming in a little late, but in reference to jaecjaec's last specs for what he was getting, he seemed to decide to go with 2133mhz ddr3. Just figured I would mention from what I have read anything over 1600, or even 1333, is actually not utilized and pretty much a waste of cash. Apparently it is do to a system bottleneck elsewhere. They have been using these higher speeds on ddr3 for ddr4 testing, since presumably the bottle will be overcome by the time the DDR4 boards are out. Anyways, I am not really that smart about computer stuff, but I read it from a reliable source. So save your money and get ddr 1333 or 1600.

And then on the subject of my own system. I am not quite cool enough to be able to go to intel just yet. I have been using and still currently use an

Asus Crosshair II formula Mobo

AMD 1090t hex core

MSI 465gtx Golden edition (beautiful cuda card).

OCZ stealth 600w psu

4 WD HD's between 500GB and 2TB

1 Silicon Power 60gb ssd (faster than shit).

4 GB DDR800 minus 2 GB because I ripped out the threads wires while trying to remove a heat sink to check if it was getting proper contact.

It is all wrapped into an Apevia SupraX mid tower case. This case was cheap, but I bought it based on reviews focussing on it's great airflow. I have 5 fans, not including the 2 on the gpu.

Anyways, I mention my system just because I imagine I am not the only one with a very tight budget. Real time playback is very smooth for simple editing. It bogs down when I run more than 3 effects usually, but this system trucks on and renders at what I consider reasonable speed. However because of the recent death of half my meager 4gb of ram, I have been faced with the need to move up to a ddr3 motherboard and ram, since 16gb of ddr3 and a nice mobo is cheaper than 8 gb of ddr2. I really wanted to max out my 16gb potential because this motherboard has been a rock, plus they don't make any motherboards with all the copper like this on has anymore, Howeve at $350 for 16gb of ddr2 is is just not practical. 16gb of ddr3 is $60 man, and I can get 990fx boards for $100 or 890fx boards for $50.

I will update when I have the new components and see how much I can really get out of an AMD hex core system.

I should add the retail price of what I put into my system is about $1200. But I paid a little less since I tend to hunt down used bargains on allot of it.

Also ordered my new Mobo and Ram yesterday =) 16GB RAM and an Asus Sabertooth 990FX. Total cost for the duo = 15,000 Yen. ($190). The 990FX has native architecture for the Bulldozer and up coming piledriver chips from AMD, so it should do a decent job as I progress into this world of editing.

I am building a second machine .. not fully specified .. and I don't think it will be fast as my 4 year old pair of e5410 Xeons.

Bang for Buck, the core will be an Intel DH67GD MB, just over $100. An intel i7-3770K and 32G of Ram http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=9CD10BCEA5CA7304

I recently have the need for a mac .. and am pretty sure I should be able to HackMac this in dual boot