Hi there,

I am purchasing PC for Avid MC. The parts will be

CPU - Core i7 920

MB - Asus P6T

Ram - Patriot 6 x 2GB

HDD - 2 x WD Black 640GB - RAID 0

GPU - Quadro FX 1800

Well based on the above, can you tell me if there will be any bottleneck problems for either CPU being too fast for GPU or if it is otherwise?

If GPU is slow, can I go for some non-professional Geforce GPU that can match up the speeds of i7 920 and that comes at around $400? Cant invest more than that for now. Heard only Quadros beat non professional GPUs at professional works but am just curious...

And, is 12gig of RAM an overkill? Will 6gig suffice? I might work on HD videos too.

Thanks,

Reddy.

If you're just running MC, then anything over 3GB RAM is overkill.  

re: the "bottlenecking":  An approved gfx card and CPU are as such because they have proven to work well together.  There are plenty of people out there running just fine with less.

For adding effects to movies, I will be using After Effects and Maya also. Will they take more RAM?

Have you considered a Mac Pro? You may find it more cost efficient and money saved could be spent on hardware raid setup? I am running MC 3 on a Mac Pro from 2007 with an nividia 7300gt gfx card and 5Gb of ram and it is more than sufficent for my needs (although a new MacPro would be lovely). By going that route you would be purchasing an AVID approved machine. The new Mac Pros are lightning fast. OpenGL support is excellent. Just an idea.

As for certified systems a Mac seems to be a more affordable and better option than a PC, but an i7 system is unsupported and even cheaper, and people already using such systems report good performance. See the Videoguys DIY page for useful info; by searching the forum You'll find a bunch of threads on configurations very close to the one You're about. I read that it also works with Mojo DX, don't know about Nitris DX however. Maybe You should also search the forum for nVidia 1800 and/or 3800 as I seem to recall that there are mixed results. I run Vista 64 with 8 GB RAM and it works much much better than Windows XP. HTH

I love Apple products but when I compare Mac and PC, I get lot more for PC for what I spend on Mac. I can get an i7, 12GB ram, Quadro 1800 and dual HDD for lot less than 2400. And I guess all these will speed up the editing process very much.

Yeah, even I will be installing Visa 64 to use all that ram.

Guys, if anyone used AfterEffects and Maya with Avid, can you please share your experience. Will I ever need 12gb of ram and do I need to change the Quadro 1800 to anything else?

Kenton.VanNatten:

If you're just running MC, then anything over 3GB RAM is overkill.  

Uhm, not really. I chose to go 64bit Vista Biz with 8GB and it makes a HUGE difference Effectively, I seem to have 40% more RAM available to the Avid compared to my previous config (4GB under XP 32bit). Allows me to have more bins open, with more, longer, more complex sequences without so much significant slowdowns.

Despite what Microsoft says about Vista 64's minimum requirements the OS is told to be happy with some 2.5 GB of RAM all for itself, and given that Avid is assigned 4 GB RAM it seems like 8 GB RAM is a minimum; if running multiple applications however the more RAM the better; AE runs great on my box and I believe that this is mostly due to the video card, it was running very well on my previous (less powerful) system with a Quadro FX 560. According to the AE guy both my systems run AE better than his 2.8 ghz Intel PowerMac fitted with a GEForce video card and this is why I believe that the Quadro cards make the difference.

Reddy,

I run with a relatively similar system, but 6 gig, Win7RC, and easily overclocking the 920 to 3.4 gig. The system is completely stable, and wonderfully responsive.

I normally edit 4x multicam in DNxHD145 with no problems. Once I tried 9 cameras, and quickly found a bottleneck with the raid system. As an experiment I reconfigured for 9 camera HDV, to shift the load from the drive array to the CPU. To my surprise it worked just fine. Don’t think the i7 system will limit much of anything. Also many of my workflow steps are now measured in hours rather than days.

Thanks for the replues guys. I am going for 12gig then.

Anyone have suggestions on fine tuning i7 system for editing? ...Newyankee?

You should be fine, just make sure your running vista business 64.

I have a very simalar system (asus P5q3, Quad core 2.83, 8 gig ram, quadro 1700)

fast as hell, rocks with Media composer and after effects. 

Good luck

What a DIFFERENCE a hard drive makes! I replaced my old WD 500GB "G" hard drive (used for render) with a new WD "Black" 500GB drive that has 32MB Cache. Results? BLAZING FAST transcodes/renders!! Before this change, I often waited hours for lengthy transcodes/clip effects. I got this "GEM" for less than $70 incl shipping from Newegg. By the way, my GFX is a GeForce 8800GT and I just installed the latest driver in the version "186" series. Results? Performance better than ever! Also love my super-cheap AMD 6400+ dual core 3.2GHz! The total cost I laid out for my "home brew" computer along with the full 3rd party suite version of AMC 3.0 (now upped to 3.1.3.2) and Liquid Pro 7.2 (incl BOB)= just under $2600 ALL-EVERYTHING! Why pay more? Whadda you NUTZ?  There's a line from early in movie "Wall Street" where the old guy who supervised the office traders uttered to Buddy Boy, "Well, someone's got to pay...Ain't gonna be me!" And that line was EXACTLY my mindset when I decided to stick with PC and go all AVID instead of FCP. AMC is improving and the day that transcoding is no longer a necessity, I will be glad to spend more of my hard-earned cash to upgrade!

danlasvegasnv:

What a DIFFERENCE a hard drive makes!