A friend of mine who I work with asked me to put together a spec for a new machine. He needs the machine to do some video editing, and handle all of his and his family’s computing needs. One of the biggest things to remember when doing video editing is to ensure that you have lots of RAM, a good processor and a good bus speed. From all the reviews I read, the core i7 is a great CPU, OCZ has good ram and the ASUS P6T is a great Motherboard.
The video card I chose is the HD 4850 X2. My reasoning for this is that it’s pretty cheap, but can handle any video processing needs without a sweat. I threw in a Blu-Ray burner drive because my friend wants a way to burn a lot of videos and data. At 50Gb per disk, that should meet his needs.
With 6GB of RAM, I think his machine will be able to handle a lot of apps running simultaneously and render video easily. He has ordered the products from Newegg (links on the Product column) so hopefully in a week or two we should have the parts to start putting this together. I plan on putting this together for him and doing some stress testing with Prime95 and 3dMark. I want to put Windows 7 as his main OS and then create an image of the machine so that he can restore to a clean state whenever he needs to. But, more on that in the near future.
Here is the parts list :-
* there were some rebates that brought the price down by approx. $100.
And here are some related posts on building a computer from CodingHorror.
Building a PC, Part I
Building a PC, Part II
Building a PC, Part III – Overclocking
Building Your Own Home Theater PC
The Promise and Peril of Jumbo Frames – (Related to network video and file transfers but still very interesting)
Hopefully I can extend on what Jeff does and show you how to add backup and imaging to your machine, so stay tuned.
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