Video Editing vs. Gaming Build

[wcrockett]

A friend of mine makes short films professionally. Currently, he edits his work on a laptop, and he's thinking about upgrading to a nice desktop rig. I've built quite a few computers for office and gaming use, but I know nothing about video editing. Would an editing rig differ greatly from a gaming rig? Thanks.

 

[hdmark]

im pretty sure the main difference is CPU vs GPU based (depending on the program?) many games require i5 level CPU's and then strong GPU's. I believe video editing requires stronger CPU's, mid range GPU's if that. But then also speedy storage is very useful where in gaming its decently useless.

My best advice would be to compare the system requirements for the program he uses against one of the games you play so see the difference.

*keep in mind this advice is just from reading suggestions others have given when similar questions were asked. i dont have any experience with video editing*

 

[why_wolf]

Find out what programs he uses for editing and check out their specs for GPU based work (most of them have it these days). Regardless for serious video editing an i7 is generally recommended as that kind of work will actually parallel well and use all the cores/threads at once. If he is really, really serious than it could be worth it to consider a 2011-v3 socket CPU to get even more core/threads.

More RAM is also highly useful in video editing so a build with 32+ GB of RAM is not crazy in a video editing machine.