What is best PC hardware for MSP 7?

[videokid]

Hi, What are the best components for video editing with MSP 7? I'm planning to buy a new PC and would like the best possible performance!

Is AMD Athlon 64bit or Pentium HT processor better? Should I wait for Pentium D (dual core) to come out this June? Will it work with MSP? What kind of graphic card do I need / is best?

I already got MSP 7 and Hauppage WinTV PVR 350 for capturing (couldn't make it work with MSP Video Capture 7, though).

Thanks for your advices

[Devil]

There is no "best" hardware.

What I recommend is to have a dedicated computer for video work, no resident apps, no Internet connection, no firewall or anti-virus etc.. If your input is compressed (DV, MJPEG etc.), I suggest three hard disks. A big'un kept exclusively for your video work, a boot disk for the OS and utilities and the first partition of the third one exclusively for swap files and the rest for your video applications. For RAM, 512 Mb is min and 1024 Mb is the max you will need.

At this stage, there is no significant advantage to be gained from 64 bit processing, as there is no true 64 bit Windows and won't be for some time and no 64 bit video apps. At the most, you will gain higher speed CPU-RAM transfers, but this is not a real limitation, anyway. If you want max horsepower, a double Xeon config would probably get you there, at a cost. However, it is doubtful whether this would improve rendering speeds significantly, as the software would not take full advantage of it, at the moment. I have MSP 7.3 on an HT machine and the performance difference with HT on or off is not enormous. I tend to think HT is more HYPErthreading!

[heinz-oz]

I agree with Devil, I have a dedicated PC with 4 HDD's to a total of 340 Gb, P4 3.2 GHz with 1 Gb dual channel DDR RAM, running XP Pro SP1. Because there is no internet connection, there is no need for the extra security crap of SP2.

I have an 60 Gb HDD for the system and programs, a 40 Gb HDD, partitioned to hold nothing but the swap file in its first partition and archive stuff in the second. A 120 Gb each for capture and rendering purposes. I need the space because I usually render my projects to AVI first for archiving to DV tape. By having two separate disks for this task, plus a separate disk to run the program and a separate disk again for the swap file, I get max throughput because there is no need for a disk to read first one segment, process and then write to another. They are just reading or writing.

You should also have a separate soundcard (stay clear of creative ones or VIA chipped ones) and (preferably) a dual head video adapter to allow for the previews to be viewed on a TV monitor.

[Terry Stetler]

The dualhead video adapter is particularly important, and those good for gaming (NVIDIA or ATI) sometimes aren't the best for video editing and vice-versa.

I use the Matrox P-750 or Parhelia because of their excellent PureVideo/DVDMAX output engine. The output is great and the controls are comprehensive.

There is also the Parhelia APVe for PCIe slots which also has HD output and an analog capture capability.

They are, however, lousy for gaming so a choice is in order.