Computer Upgrade

[Legend]

My job kept me up on current technology and which software and what hardware was at the best price / performance point. But since retirement I'm getting really far out of the loop. I need suggestions from any of you folks who are staying current.

I generally upgrade my workhorse computer about every 5 to 7 years and roll the old one over to wife for her e-mail. It's time to do it again. I do a lot of video editing and encoding - no gaming - don't want to get into overclocking / water cooling and that extreme level of performance.

I'm kind of leaning toward an Intel 9300 quad 2.5 with a Gigabyte p43 motherboard and a Gigabyte Gforce 240 video card as being far enough up the curve to be worth the upgrade hassle, but not so far up the curve to be paying a huge premium. It looks like mainboard, cpu, 2GB RAM, etc., will come in around $500. Any thoughts?

 

[Jaymz9350]

I'd personally look at AMD's offerings. Based off new egg pricing you can grab a six core @ 2.6 for the same price as the Q9300 (will help with the video work) and DDR3 RAM is pretty much the same price as DDR2 now. It also puts you a little more current for pretty much the same price as what your looking at.

 

[baxtej44]

i would suggest getting more than 2gb of ram... i'd suggest even as high as 6gb(6 might be kind of overkill though), it's just going to help you out running multiple processes at one time

 

[ZackW]

If you do a lot of video editing, the more ram the better, I would suggest at least 4gb minimum. The new Adobe Premiere has been tested and shown that using 8GB over 4GB is something like 50-600% faster depending on what you are doing. The more ram, the more you can store on it, and ram is way faster than accessing the hard drives constantly.

I would also suggest an i7 Intel processor, though the 9300 is still a great chip. While the AMDs are rated just as fast, Intel has usually always had the lead when it came to actual work like editing video. And for the video card, a 240 would be fine as it really doesn't affect editing anyway, aside from being able to properly display overlays and such.

It would also help immensely to grab multiple hard drives and set them up in a RAID0 to really speed them up when the RAM isn't enough.