New PC specification

[welchb]

Hi Guys,

It's been a while since I've been on here and I'm at that stage where I'm going to be upgrading my current PC to a brand new machine.... Given things have moved on a bit (and still are) since I last bought my PC I was wondering if there's any recommendations for must have 'technology' on my new machine re. VideoStudio.

I've not got an exact spec yet, however am thinking about something along the lines of -->

Intel i7-2600 Quad Core 3.4ghz 8mb cache + HD Graphics (I would have the option of the K chip version which I think is for overclocking
ASUS Sabertooth P67 Motherboard
16GB Kingston Hyper X Genesis DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
Graphics' card Undecided as yet Probably NVIDIA GEFORCE Range
1st HDD -- INTEL 300GB 320 Series SSD
2nd HDD -- 1.5TD Western Digital Cavier Black
1 x 12xBlu-Ray - Rewriter

I probably want to run two monitors hence why I've not decided on Graphics card as yet.....
Budget is not so much a problem @ this stage so please feel free to make any recommendations -- obviously if it's too much I might need to make some trade offs.

Was thinking of MS Windows 7 -- Professional 64 bit edition

Now are their technologies such as CUDA (sorry don't know much about this) I should be thinking about ?
Or any must have items.... ?

I will be using the latest verison of Video Studio

I did do a search of the forums and could not find anything specific...

Tkx,

Brian

T

[UncleBoo]

Hi Brian,

What you're proposing is more than adequate to use VS X4 (the latest version). A couple of minor suggestions:
1. If you're going to work with a lot of video, you can't have too much disk. Given your budget and continuing price reductions, I suggest a 2TB or even 3TB drive.
2. You might also want to consider getting two drives (of matching capacity) and "mirroring" them (aka RAID 1) to protect your data if one drive fails.
3. If you don't get a mirror drive, I strongly recommend getting an external USB drive at least as big as your internal drive, and running regular incremental backups to that drive.
4. In home use, the only significant advantage of Win 7 Pro is that some older 32-bit software won't run in Win 7's 32-but mode, but Win 7 Pro supports a Windows XP virtual mode which will run the older software. This is definitely NOT necessary to run VS X4. Only you can decide whether you have software which will require XP mode; if not, there's no need for the extra expense.

Finally, yes, Corel says VS X4 uses CUDA to accelerate rendering, but there have been a few posters to this forum stating they see no performance improvement with CUDA. I don't have CUDA or X4 so I can't comment from personal experience. Caveat emptor.

HTH,
Uncle Boo

[welchb]

Tkx HTH -- Uncle Boo

Yeah the cofig I'm looking @ does have a SSD as 1st Hard Drive and then a bigger 2nd drive so I could bump that up a little as disk space/drive are relativily cheap these days...

As per the backups -- I didn't mention in my 1st post --- however I have a NAS storage device on my network and this is both expandable and has mirroring, so I normally have at least 3 copies of finished projects ---- 1 on PC, 1 as a backup on NAS and of course the mirrored copy.

This backup is done between any PC on the network and NAS automatically so from that point I should not need to change for additional storage.

I do also have a 1TB portable drive which I use from time to time to carry a number of projects around on, however I do not relie on this as a real backup just because the drive is portable and can get knocked around etc....

Appreciate all of the other comments and re. Win7 --- sounds good so best get this rolling now.

All the best,

Brian