- Jun 21, 2001
- 4
- 0
- 18,510
I thought it was an interesting article... But I wouldn't have payed nearly that much for that system. Here is something I did a few weeks ago that works quite well, and for 1/3 the price.
First, my aunt wanted a new video editing system, for under $1000. Tough. Couldn't be done I thought, and told her, so I said I'd make something that'd get by if she liked. She said sure. I went around price watch and planned out this system.
AMD Athlon 1800+: (slower bus, but with her price limit I couldn't afford a P4 with RDRAM)
ASUS A7V333 -w- Raid and Audio: Better bus speed, won't actually mean much without a 333mhz bus on the processor bus. I'm hoping ASUS will support it with the 2700+ and faster for future upgrades
1x 256MB Micron PC2700 Memory: Might as well have fast memory for a fast board. Also, Micron is the brand I've been most pleased with.
ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV: I've never been fond of ATI's cards, theve given me no end of grief in compatability and performance: Except in the digital video and TV Tuner areas. This was the optimal card for my Aunt since that's what she wanted.
2x IBM 40GB 7200RPM hard drives. Large enough to do the trick, small enough to keep the price down. Need to, one for start data, one for result data (that way it's going to have less bus transfer issues with speed). I didn't get a Maxtor (though it would have been cheaper) because they don't play nice with other drives (I've seen too many ide chain conflicts where they wouldn't work with another drive on the chain), and to my experience, they die quick. I wanted my aunt to have as few problems as possible.
A Toshiba DVD drive (SD-W2002), which supports the -R -RW standards. Again I've been fond of Toshiba products. Though it couldn't do CD-RW like the Pioneer, it had more DVD compatability (read and write), and my Aunt has a CD Burner we'd be carrying over.
And, of course, a Case with plenty of fans.
A 56k modem, since she wanted to wait for a while before getting a high speed internet connection. (her old modem was ISA)
Windows XP for media use.
From her old system we carried over the CD-RW. This was an 8x4x24x Creative labs (I'm estimating the speeds). It didn't play nice, so I couldn't have a hard drive on the same chain as it. This made me a bit annoyed because I wanted to have the hard drives on different IDE chains to optimize speed as much as I could.
Her old monitor keyboard and mouse were drafted for use too. We could have gotten a Flat Panel, but we wanted better refresh rates and contrast, so we stuck with TFT.
Well, to make a long story short, we couldn't order anything online due to timing issues, so we had to find the most reasonably priced store in the area. They were relatively good. But we payed 2x the price I wanted to for the HDs. I also got an extra stick of memory, my Aunt splerged and got a new (and nice printer), and we decided to grab a DVD Reader only (wait for the DVD writer standards to clear up so we didn't get the Beta of DVD drives). Everything cost a bit more than I had found it online (from almost nothing on some parts, to $30 on the motherboard, and $80 on the video card).
Total Price: $1350 (online, I could have had the whole setup for not much over $1000 easy)
So, in 3 hours I had the system setup (hardware). The next day almost all of the software was installed.
Here were the issues and noteables I found with this setup:
Creative drive didn't play nice with hard drives, so I had to stick the hard drives on one chain.
ATI came with a copy of Counter Strike, that didn't have a key so I couldn't play it. If anyone knows how to fix this please tell me.
One of the pieces (I belive the motherboard) came with a piece of video editing software I installed. It seems to work well.
ATI had quite a few pieces of video editing software I liked.
The oneboard sound was actually really nice.
The case I bough was screwless, or supposedly. The hard drive bays needed screws. The PCI bays had a screwless clamp, it didn't work so well. I went back to the store to grab some blanks to put on the back plate that used screws. They didn't have any, and the guy said that he usually used screws for the PCI slots/cards as well on that case. (Unfortunately, the case blanks couldn't use screws). I would have loved for some advanced warning on that one. Moral of the story, if you can, REALLY CHECK OUT THE CASE BEFORE YOU BUY IT. POKE AROUND AT EVERYTHING. But it came with a 350W powe supply. It works well enough I guess.
Drive partition setup:
Primary Master: 10GB for system drive partition, 30 for 'starting data' (before editing)
Primary Slave: 40GB for 'final product' (where to store the editing product).
So, without boring you with further details, it recorded full 640x480 video at 30fps in various formats supported by the ATI TV Tuner just fine. It connected to her VCR and Camcorder great (and could have connected to much more), and finally, it could have connected to many other inputs, and quite a few outputs.
Video conversion with simple clipping, cutting and pasting of segments was done at faster than real time (the software had us pick the edits, then ran through and wrote the new compilation at faster than real time).
So, for under $1500 (and much under if you are careful) this makes a great system for digital video editing.
Any questions/comments?
First, my aunt wanted a new video editing system, for under $1000. Tough. Couldn't be done I thought, and told her, so I said I'd make something that'd get by if she liked. She said sure. I went around price watch and planned out this system.
AMD Athlon 1800+: (slower bus, but with her price limit I couldn't afford a P4 with RDRAM)
ASUS A7V333 -w- Raid and Audio: Better bus speed, won't actually mean much without a 333mhz bus on the processor bus. I'm hoping ASUS will support it with the 2700+ and faster for future upgrades
1x 256MB Micron PC2700 Memory: Might as well have fast memory for a fast board. Also, Micron is the brand I've been most pleased with.
ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV: I've never been fond of ATI's cards, theve given me no end of grief in compatability and performance: Except in the digital video and TV Tuner areas. This was the optimal card for my Aunt since that's what she wanted.
2x IBM 40GB 7200RPM hard drives. Large enough to do the trick, small enough to keep the price down. Need to, one for start data, one for result data (that way it's going to have less bus transfer issues with speed). I didn't get a Maxtor (though it would have been cheaper) because they don't play nice with other drives (I've seen too many ide chain conflicts where they wouldn't work with another drive on the chain), and to my experience, they die quick. I wanted my aunt to have as few problems as possible.
A Toshiba DVD drive (SD-W2002), which supports the -R -RW standards. Again I've been fond of Toshiba products. Though it couldn't do CD-RW like the Pioneer, it had more DVD compatability (read and write), and my Aunt has a CD Burner we'd be carrying over.
And, of course, a Case with plenty of fans.
A 56k modem, since she wanted to wait for a while before getting a high speed internet connection. (her old modem was ISA)
Windows XP for media use.
From her old system we carried over the CD-RW. This was an 8x4x24x Creative labs (I'm estimating the speeds). It didn't play nice, so I couldn't have a hard drive on the same chain as it. This made me a bit annoyed because I wanted to have the hard drives on different IDE chains to optimize speed as much as I could.
Her old monitor keyboard and mouse were drafted for use too. We could have gotten a Flat Panel, but we wanted better refresh rates and contrast, so we stuck with TFT.
Well, to make a long story short, we couldn't order anything online due to timing issues, so we had to find the most reasonably priced store in the area. They were relatively good. But we payed 2x the price I wanted to for the HDs. I also got an extra stick of memory, my Aunt splerged and got a new (and nice printer), and we decided to grab a DVD Reader only (wait for the DVD writer standards to clear up so we didn't get the Beta of DVD drives). Everything cost a bit more than I had found it online (from almost nothing on some parts, to $30 on the motherboard, and $80 on the video card).
Total Price: $1350 (online, I could have had the whole setup for not much over $1000 easy)
So, in 3 hours I had the system setup (hardware). The next day almost all of the software was installed.
Here were the issues and noteables I found with this setup:
Creative drive didn't play nice with hard drives, so I had to stick the hard drives on one chain.
ATI came with a copy of Counter Strike, that didn't have a key so I couldn't play it. If anyone knows how to fix this please tell me.
One of the pieces (I belive the motherboard) came with a piece of video editing software I installed. It seems to work well.
ATI had quite a few pieces of video editing software I liked.
The oneboard sound was actually really nice.
The case I bough was screwless, or supposedly. The hard drive bays needed screws. The PCI bays had a screwless clamp, it didn't work so well. I went back to the store to grab some blanks to put on the back plate that used screws. They didn't have any, and the guy said that he usually used screws for the PCI slots/cards as well on that case. (Unfortunately, the case blanks couldn't use screws). I would have loved for some advanced warning on that one. Moral of the story, if you can, REALLY CHECK OUT THE CASE BEFORE YOU BUY IT. POKE AROUND AT EVERYTHING. But it came with a 350W powe supply. It works well enough I guess.
Drive partition setup:
Primary Master: 10GB for system drive partition, 30 for 'starting data' (before editing)
Primary Slave: 40GB for 'final product' (where to store the editing product).
So, without boring you with further details, it recorded full 640x480 video at 30fps in various formats supported by the ATI TV Tuner just fine. It connected to her VCR and Camcorder great (and could have connected to much more), and finally, it could have connected to many other inputs, and quite a few outputs.
Video conversion with simple clipping, cutting and pasting of segments was done at faster than real time (the software had us pick the edits, then ran through and wrote the new compilation at faster than real time).
So, for under $1500 (and much under if you are careful) this makes a great system for digital video editing.
Any questions/comments?
/www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=19557" target="_new">http
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