Time for an upgrade

[GeoffM]

Youtube finally paid me!
To celebrate, I want to upgrade my computer to aid in video editing.

I'd like to upgrade the video card, but I'm not sure if RAM would be more helpful.

Off the top of my head(I'm on a different computer):
i7 2700k 3.5 ghz
16 GB RAM
GeForce 8800 GT Nvidia
750 GB main drive and two 1 TB storage drives.
700w power supplies.

I can go to 32 GB of Ram. When I bought my MB, I made sure it was current with PCI, and I think it's PCI x16 3.0

I'd like to stay with Nvidia again, if possible.
Are they still better cards than ATI?

Under $200 please

[GeoffM]

I went back through and found my video card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130318

Bought it a little more than 5 years ago

[steelbluesleepR]

what do you do on youtube? I'm at work and can't go on there to check it out.

[GeoffM]

what do you do on youtube? I'm at work and can't go on there to check it out.

Car repair videos and bike videos.

[Raf99]

Youtube finally paid me!
To celebrate, I want to upgrade my computer to aid in video editing.

I'd like to upgrade the video card, but I'm not sure if RAM would be more helpful.

Off the top of my head(I'm on a different computer):
i7 2700k 3.5 ghz
16 GB RAM
GeForce 8800 GT Nvidia
750 GB main drive and two 1 TB storage drives.
700w power supplies.

I can go to 32 GB of Ram. When I bought my MB, I made sure it was current with PCI, and I think it's PCI x16 3.0

I'd like to stay with Nvidia again, if possible.
Are they still better cards than ATI?

Under $200 please

This all depends what you use your computer for. The clients I deal with that use 32GB of RAM use AutoCAD, Photoshop on top of their other daily apps.

The video card would be the best bet, assuming you need more video power (gaming, movies, etc). Personally I'd invest in a SSD drive to improve your computer multi-tasking ability.

[GeoffM]

This all depends what you use your computer for. The clients I deal with that use 32GB of RAM use AutoCAD, Photoshop on top of their other daily apps.

The video card would be the best bet, assuming you need more video power (gaming, movies, etc). Personally I'd invest in a SSD drive to improve your computer multi-tasking ability.

For my own christmas present I was considering either a SSD or a second monitor.
If my girlfriend ends up moving in and bringing our 50" tv I won't need one.

Apparently the computer I have now is decent for editing. But, I've never done any.
Anytime I sit down to try and learn I get distracted or frustrated and go do something else.

[Raf99]

For my own christmas present I was considering either a SSD or a second monitor.
If my girlfriend ends up moving in and bringing our 50" tv I won't need one.

Apparently the computer I have now is decent for editing. But, I've never done any.
Anytime I sit down to try and learn I get distracted or frustrated and go do something else.

So just determine the bottleneck for your PC in terms of what you do with it. Are you running out of RAM, HDD thrashing, out of space, choppy video, taking too long to render/edit/convert? If you don't have dual monitors and you multi-task , well........ this is a must. I don't think I could ever use one monitor again.

My lastest upgrade was a NAS box consisting of 4x 3TB WD Red HDDs as I was sick of always running out of space.

[trickedaccord92]

It looks like you have a descent setup at the moment. My suggestions for upgrades are these and reason why will also be given.


GPU - Your graphics card is isn't horrible but graphics cards have come a long ways in the last couple of years. As for preferences ATI vs Nvidia has been a long drawn out pissing contest. I have used both and both are good. Lately the Nvidia cards have been out performing ATI cards in the same price range but for your needs you likely won't notice the difference either way. In the $200 price range a 650Ti ($150ish) or even better a 660 ($200ish) would be a massive improvement over your 8800 with a 50%-77% improvement across the board with the 650Ti and even more from the 660.

SSD - An SSD will greatly improve your program speeds from start up if you install windows on it to opening and running programs that are installed on it. Gamers really like SSD because they cut loading times down to near nothing. So if you have issues with programs taking too long to do what you want them to an SSD is a good investment but if you really don't notice loading times or your programs run at a good speed you can wait on this one.

Monitor - A second monitor is a huge tool for video editing. Being able to expand your work space to multiple monitors make things a lot easier when running numerous programs at the same time. I would consider the monitor over the SSD but under the GPU.

Memory - With 16 gig you are good for now. My guess is even with all the video editing you might do you probably don't even use 12 gig of the 16 you have.

Something you didn't post but should consider also is your cooling setup. Running your CPU hard with video editing software can cause it to heat up and slow down or damage. There are a lot of good closed loop liquid cooling systems on the market to help with temps while not taking up a lot of room with the custom lines and what not.

So with all of that said I think a GPU would be your biggest upgrade, followed by a second monitor, and finally a SSD.

[GeoffM]

So with all of that said I think a GPU would be your biggest upgrade, followed by a second monitor, and finally a SSD.

I think that’s a good way to go.
I was looking pretty seriously at that 660. One of my classmates suggested the 700 series for around $250, but the 600’s seem to outperform them.
I’m currently using roaming profiles, which is slow, and I never implemented them all the way. Logging on takes like 3 minutes. I’m about to upgrade to a gigabit network and stop using roaming profiles.
What I’ll probably end up doing is using local profiles, buying the graphics card now, and buying a 2nd monitor for Christmas.

16 gig is nice, and I only really see a bottleneck when I’m running multiple virtual machines. I’d like to avoid water cooling. So many horror stories, and my computer spends most of it’s time idle. I leave it on so I can remote in when I’m away from home, which is most of the day.

[cloudasc]

Since your main concern is video editing, the most likely bottleneck is most likely your storage devices. Reading from the source file, and then writing to cache, most likely on the same disks none the less, and since SATA drives can only read or write at any given time, your disk speed is halved.

Here is a recent example I experienced.

Two computers completely identical to each other, both running Hyper-V and virtual machines. Needed to clone the 'base machine' on each, and I found it faster to transfer the 'base' from one host to another (over gigabit) then to make a copy of the file on the same drive. The main drive in each is 1TB.

The main bottleneck with any computer over the last 20 years has been the storage subsystem.

Another example, two completely identical computer, different from the first example, both had 40gb hard drives, and 256MB of ram. On one I gave it 1gb of ram, and the other I upgraded the hard drive to 160gb.

Guess which one saw the largest performance increase?

The one with the upgraded hard drive.

The only other option that might behoove you, is a RAM upgrade, and maybe turning part of it into a RAMDISK that you can store the temporary project data on.

The only time a video card might help, is if the software your using to edit supports OpenCL, or CUDA, which could help reduce encoding times also.

[GeoffM]

Isn't a large portion of the video being held in memory?
I thought that was why having so much of it was important.

Even with an SSD, memory still reads/writes faster.

I am strongly considering it, but I want them to become a bit bigger and the price to come down before I invest in them. My OS footprint usually exceeds 100 GB, and anything big enough to hold that with extra space is still quite pricey.

I'm probably going to go with the method suggested earlier:
Graphics card > Extra Monitor > SSD

I realized I had a smaller extra monitor laying around in the basement, so I might hook it up for a few months until I buy a another matching monitor.
22" and a 15" for now, then a 22" and a 24" later.

[trickedaccord92]

Isn't a large portion of the video being held in memory?
I thought that was why having so much of it was important.

Even with an SSD, memory still reads/writes faster.

I am strongly considering it, but I want them to become a bit bigger and the price to come down before I invest in them. My OS footprint usually exceeds 100 GB, and anything big enough to hold that with extra space is still quite pricey.

I'm probably going to go with the method suggested earlier:
Graphics card > Extra Monitor > SSD

I realized I had a smaller extra monitor laying around in the basement, so I might hook it up for a few months until I buy a another matching monitor.
22" and a 15" for now, then a 22" and a 24" later.

I am currently using a 27" ASUS monitor and 27" SANYO TV side by side for my dual monitor setup until I can remodel my computer room and get my 32" mounted to the wall again.

This was my setup until a few months ago when I moved my computer downstairs into what is going to be our office/entertainment room.

[cloudasc]

Isn't a large portion of the video being held in memory?
I thought that was why having so much of it was important.

Even with an SSD, memory still reads/writes faster.

I am strongly considering it, but I want them to become a bit bigger and the price to come down before I invest in them. My OS footprint usually exceeds 100 GB, and anything big enough to hold that with extra space is still quite pricey.

I'm probably going to go with the method suggested earlier:
Graphics card > Extra Monitor > SSD

I realized I had a smaller extra monitor laying around in the basement, so I might hook it up for a few months until I buy a another matching monitor.
22" and a 15" for now, then a 22" and a 24" later.

When your doing your video editing, open up task manager, and see how much ram your using... most likely it's not using all of it. The memory is mainly used for processing the data in its uncompressed format, and to hold the data operations that are being performed on by the CPU. Where is the CPU getting the source data from that it puts into memory? The storage subsystem. Then maybe hop into resource monitor, and see how much 'thrashing' or usage is going on with your hard drives while editing / encoding, and make your decision there.

The other thing that might help is telling everyone what video editing program you use, as each one has it's strengths and weaknesses, some favor multithreading, some favor OpenCL, some favor CUDA, and some see improvements from Virtu MVP if your motherboard supports it.