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Computer upgrade ssd graphics card monitor
  • sethdpsethdp

    Was thinking of upgrading a few parts in my computer. To get the most out of it. Right now i have a quad core i7 3.46 processor 64 bit, 16 gb of ram, radeon 6770 graphics card. Running Vegas pro 11 and hit films software with no problems. Rendering at 1080p takes right a round what the edit is. Was thinking of upgrading with a ssd just for windows os and editing software. Was looking at the Kingston hyperx ssd. Is the 120 gb enough or get the 240gb? Next is the graphics card. Was looking at the radeon 7970. Is this a good choice or something like the gtx 580 ? Lastly im looking at 2560x1600 resolution monitors is this over kill? Or will the extra sharpness in color.help any thanks Seth

  • 22 Replies sorted by
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    I really suggest to post in proper category next time, as I am tired of moving topics.

    Also try to split your questions and use existing topics for each part, if you can find them.

    For monitor : http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/2031/broadcast-monitor-for-color-correction-vs-affordable-alternatives

  • kenoahkenoah

    When you upgrade ill buy your old parts

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    When you upgrade ill buy your old parts

    :-)

    @sethdp

    To be short. Get largest and fastest SSD you can get.

    And get middle range NVidia card (or top, if you have unlimited money), as most editors only support CUDA.

  • itimjimitimjim

    I'm using a Hazro 27" IPS monitor with a resolution of 2560x1440. It's very good, and only £395 when I bought it. IPS makes a huge difference. There's a 10-bit model available too for about £600.

    I'm also running a Crucial M4 SSD, but only 64GB. OS and applications are on it, but content and other files are stored on a 7.2k rpm SATA 300. I'm only using i5 2.67 and a ATI 5570, but I get on OK with CS 5.5. If anything, I'm looking at upgrading to 32GB RAM, as After Effects will eat it all up.

    As I'm running a Hackintosh, my choices for CUDA are really limited to the expensive Quadro cards, so I'm going to stay happy as I am for now.

  • sethdpsethdp

    Thanks for the replies. Is there a difference between the brands that make nvidia cards? Looking at a pny gtx580. Thanks again

  • sam_sticklandsam_stickland

    This page has lots and lots of info on CUDA cards for Premiere

    http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

    As it stands today PP either won't make use of all the cores on the higher end graphics cards, or you'll find that your cpu/memory/disks are the bottleneck. On my AMD 1055t (at 3.75GHz o/c) with 8GB of RAM and a 64GB Cosair SSD I can't get PP to push my GT 440 past 15% load, but it maxs out my CPU.

  • holmes6holmes6

    I'm currently running an unusual RAID setup in windows 7 with 4 older spinning hard drives striped in disk manager. It is alot more power and heat vs. ssd setup, but performs well and was created using parts I had on hand. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff382722.aspx explains how to do this.

    Obviously SSD drive(s) are the better choice if you're building a new system with new parts, but this idea may be useful for some. Also, link above posted by @sam_strickland was useful for me, as it allowed me to use my GTX260 for PP CUDA.

  • sethdpsethdp

    Between a ssd or upgrading to a 6 core i7 which would give me better results?

  • MacalincagMacalincag

    @sethdp

    What do you want better results in? All an ssd would do (assuming you're using it for a boot drive) would make booting and shutting down fast, opening applications fast and snappy, as well as indexing. A 6-core i7 would make processing/rendering things a dream, especially if you overclock it. Having both obviously is nice, which I have currently, but an SSD is really just convenience.

  • sam_sticklandsam_stickland

    @sethdp

    Benchmark it (Resource Monitor in Windows 7 is pretty good) and see where the bottleneck is :)

    It can change from project to project. If you have a lot of video files but very few effects then the drives will probably be the slowest point. But, you could also have a very effect heavy AE composition with very few video elements and find the CPU is the weakest link.

  • sethdpsethdp

    Thanks for the replies. If i go the six core i7 route, Im looking at either the 3960x or 3930k. With both of these i need to get a new motherboard. Is there a particular one i should look at getting?

    If i keep the 4 core i7 2600 i.have now can i get another board to add more ram? Any particular one? Intel desktop extreme series any good

    Thanks

  • OSGondarOSGondar

    @sethdp 2560x1600 resolution is not over kill assuming its at least 32inch monitor or more.. why would it be overkill? one day you'll find yourself working with 4k cameras... and in that case.. its NOT ENOUGH!

    You want to keep your processor and instead upgrade to an nvidia card so that you can take advantage of and enable the CUDA engine in PP and even AE will benefit because many plugins will run much more efficiently especially in heavy multi later projects offloading all the processing to the GPU and NOT the cpu... Most of my plugins let me choose the gpu. So the card upgrade will increase performance in AE plenty, way more than the cpu upgrade will. its going to use the gpu for real time and final rendering and cpu for whats left, but assuming you have use previews enabled the cpu is doing little of the work by the time you final render...

    "Between a ssd or upgrading to a 6 core i7 which would give me better results?" -Assuming all of the project footage are all on the SSD then the SSD is a major upgrade too with this combo BUT if you keep your footage on a separate not ssd drive then eh, you will be limited by this in the end when it comse to overall performance and speed of final output so yes go for the bigger SSD so you can manage all of the work and footage on this ssd drive and only move it to other drives for archiving projects when you are done.. , which means you want to add ssd, then better card, so that you can squeeze real performance out of this build before considering a whole new chip set.

    Your cpu is already pretty fantastic, i have the same one overclocked to 4.9ghz with water cooling. I know i for one will not see a big difference moving to current 6cores. I even run it at 5.3 sometimes =)

    16gb of ram is good for this combo and that would be the next thing i would upgrade after ssd and a video card worthy of editing... 32gb is pretty sweet. and your motherboard should support it, at least the better Sandy bridge boards do. In my case its a ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe LGA 1155 i use with all of the above. Its been replaced with the "GEN" version recently so im not sure about the GEN, but i highly recommend the P8Z68 , i LOVE this board, always pushing it to the max. What would be the point of upgrading the processor if the gpu will do most of the work with cuda enabled? And if you are not using AE, then use your processor at higher clocks! and pretend you bought a new one. Because unless you are upgrading to a whole new generation, not really worth it. Especially since you are not using your stuff at peak performance before you invest any more money, that's a great processor you have. Performance is not relying on the best cpu while other parts hold you back.

  • Mark_the_HarpMark_the_Harp

    I've been looking into this as I use Vegas too - I believe the number of cores / processor speed is important for Vegas users. I bought a 256GB SSD the other day and it really is fast - slowly migrating to Windows 7 but even with my current CPU, booting using the SSD, loading Vegas from it, and then saving back to it, was a lot quicker than with my current HDD setup. However, many new SSDs can use SATA 3 so you need a motherboard that supports that. Mine doesn't so the next item on my shopping list is a new board and one of the 6-core i7's.

    I've had a go a using the free benchmarking software from http://novabench.com/ - and after you've run it on yours, have a look at some of the top CPUs / GPUs to see what rates highly.

  • sam_sticklandsam_stickland

    Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I thought only PPro used CUDA not AE? AFAIK there are effects in AE that will use OpenGL acceleration if available, but they are pretty few and far between.

  • itimjimitimjim

    @sam_stickland, you are exactly right. Premiere Pro Mercury Playback engine supports CUDA. After Effects uses OpenGL acceleration.

    If you're a Mac user, Quadro 4000 for Mac is pretty much the only CUDA supported card that is available to buy new, which has about a 15% premium on top of the PC version.

  • Mark_the_HarpMark_the_Harp

    @sethdp With the monitor, wouldn't a bigger one simply be taking the 1080p and upscaling it? In which case I'd have thought a monitor with a native resolution of 1920x1080 would be better than something which is upscaling that (assuming you're working in 1080 of course)?

  • OSGondarOSGondar

    @Mark_the_Harp you want as much real estate and rez as you can get when editing especially hd content or higher. the active preview window is generally not full screened while you work is it? most of the space is your timeline tools effects etc etc. A higher rez monitor is great thing especially for editing and working with hd footage and higher like 4k etc.

    I cant imagine a single downside of more screen real estate for editing. We are talking computers here, you can full screen a 1080p video you edited or a movie etc and its not going to mess with the rez of the source file at all just because its a bigger monitor, you are simply showing it on a bigger screen so sure it stretches out a little more but that's about it.. you wont notice a loss in quality until the screen gets big enough. uprezzig is something your hdtv might do to your dvds or something but pc wise its not an issue.

  • jamjam

    GTX 285 for mac still available on ebay, supports CUDA GPU acceleration. Beware of overclocked (SSC version) cards, didn't work in my macpro 3.1. EVGA has B stock sometimes - email them.

  • sethdpsethdp

    Thanks for the replies. I was looking at those monitors for the colors. To help.grade

  • MeierhansMeierhans

    http://blog.krama.tv/hacking-adobe-premiere-cs5-to-enable-more-nvidia-cuda-cards/

  • jamjam

    Yep even better!

  • Mark_the_HarpMark_the_Harp

    @OSGondar Of course - that makes perfect sense - and sorry not to have replied earlier as my computer's been in bits.

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