Note: this post is in response to a friend but information therein is can be useful to anyone that I have shared this post with or managed to bump into this web log

Alright, so here’s the deal:

The fact that you told me that your primary wish was to use the computer for video editing helped me immensely in figuring out what kind of build to put together for you.

Before, I figured, from previous conversations that you were simply trying to get a budget build machine that you can get the most out of, and so I figured that I can wait till the last minute to figure out a few builds that were within less than a thousand dollars to then make sure you had something that, though generic in the purposes that they were particularly designed for (office work, webs surfing, not-so-graphically intense video gaming, multimedia) that it’d be a high quality product that will last you for a very long time with proper care and maintenance.

Video Editing Builds

Unlike budget builds, computers meant for video editing require for you to work on a different direction focused on the CPU primarily as they have always been for decades since the 1980s and 1990s the main component for all things video editing and compositing. There were attempts during the aughts for incorporating the processing power of the GPU (video graphics card) to co-process with the CPU but the software required to program for making that possible has proven to being too difficult, costly, and just not sufficiently economic enough all around to make that a feature. But I’m sure someone is working on it and it’ll be something that some software and hardware vendor will come up with to sell to commercial clientele.

So what does that all mean? You’re looking at something that can range from six-hundred to two-thousand and five-hundred dollars worth of hardware that you can choose and the bulk of the cost will always be the CPU, followed by the motherboard.

Why the motherboard? Motherboards are generally the same in terms of the setup of how they are designed but when it comes asking what is the overall purpose intent of use of the motherboard whether it’s for gaming, office work, or heavy computational tasks like scientific math modeling, 3D graphics sculpting, and, yes, video editing, you’re going to need to be more scrutinizing with the kind of motherboard you will get. Guides will suggest brands and models that are really for “prosumers” that are on a budget but I figured that it’s best to go with what is intended for professional use because, fuck it, why not? And given the intended purposes and clientele in mind, they can be entrusted to be built to last.

With that in mind, here’s the hardware wishlist I have so far (I’ll talk about the case later in this post).

AMD V.S. Intel: “But Intel Tho…”

Intel has been having competition from AMD for the last couple of years (I’d say since 2017). AMD has released new CPUs that offer more cores, more multi-tasking capabilities, and better throughput when it comes to processing data output in terms of quantities of data but not necessarily in terms of rate of speed.

The thing about AMD is that they are offering, at sometimes significantly lower prices, CPUs that are fantastic for consumers that are making gaming builds and there are some economically conscious builders that will still stick with AMD always because they are offering good deals for the initial costs of building systems that are based on their chips. Take for instance, the recent high end model, the TR3 3990X that has 64 physical processing cores at a frequency of 2.9GHz. Pretty impressive right?

This has even prompted Intel to release some higher-core count CPUs on their high end models such as the 8 physical core Core i9 series. Which on paper looks pretty tame, and you would be correct but you have to understand that cores don’t count in translating into actual processing speed. Where multiple cores count is multi-tasking stability but it doesn’t translate into higher general output speeds; the speeds of the individual cores translates to the general overall speed of the CPU itself in the end.

So, again, what does that mean for you? Well, AMD is offering anything less than what is $1,000 a better deal than what Intel is offering but for the exchange that you have something that is slightly slower in overall performance.

Take for instance the Intel chip I picked out for you, the Corei5-9600K, which clocks at 3.7GHz at four cores: the output of this would outmatch the AMD Ryzen 7 2700 which goes for $100 less and for nominal difference. Now you might think “well why not go for the cheaper one?” This would be the part that I would say “yes but no.”

Yes because, in your capacity, for the editing projects that you’ll endeavor, you will not need anything super high end or anything in particular expensive. But, when it comes to speed, application performance and overall reliability, Intel is your best bet.

That’s not to say that AMD is not your best bet, but I’ll just say this: there’s a reason why professionals will only use AMD to build machines to produce their video editing machines on the cheap but when they can, they’ll go for Intel based machines in a heartbeat.

And that reason is eco-system consistency. That’s to say that video editing software developers usually keep Intel in mind when they develop and compile their software. Sure, they also have AMD in thought but really it’s an after-thought usually. This can also be said for video games as well because simply put, AMD is a competitor to Intel, a company that has more market share.

Now I’m telling you this because AMD is offering a lot of money’s worth - in fact it’s possible to upgrade from a cheaper chip to a higher performance latter model years later with the same motherboard! - but in the end Intel is usually going to be the company to go to for professional applications such as video production.

There’s even developers in the Linux community that primarily think and design with the thought of machines with Intel in mind.

Maybe later on, if you wish, go right ahead and get an AMD chip for a build if you want to build something cheap and easy for the kids that will want their own PC for themselves, AMD is perfectly fine. But for a first “family computer” that will be expected to be around for decade at most? I’d stick with an Intel.

The Other Stuff (RAM, storage devices)

I’ve decided to follow with 32GB of RAM because video editing will demand a lot and if you are going to be editing at the least at 1920x1080 at 60 frames/second, then you’re going to need as much RAM as you can have and some overhead. Because I’m sure that your lady will want home videos in 4K at some point (don’t have her read that for the love of GOD!) and so with that in mind, having a starter internal hard drive of 4TB at 7200 RPM speed is great for storing the raw video for editing and while you’re editing and encoding video outputs. The SSD is for Windows to boot from and to only use for Windows itself, I’d recommend to having programs be installed in the 4TB HDD because you want to avoid as much read/writing on the SSD for longevity.

You can always opt instead for a traditional HDD for booting windows, the boot times are not that dramatically slow and degradation due to read/write times will be gradual than sudden as the case with SSDs in general (I can tell you that fun story with my home server some time!)

The case

I didn’t include the case because there’s a problem at the moment and that’s the computer case manufacturers are making some weird-ass “GaMeR” designs that include tempered glass and I know you have children and I don’t want accidents, ever. As cool as they look, I think they’re terrible.

There’s also another problem: people are using steel again to build computer chassis and this is probably due to the spike in prices for aluminum no thanks to the stupid trade wars with China at the moment (it even killed the manufacturer of my favorite chassis builder that I happen to be the owner of - Caselabs).

Why Aluminum? as I said before, better heat dissipation overall as the material makes your case a giant ass heat dissipater given that aluminum is great at transferring heat.

so I found a model that is still in production - sort of - by Lian Li that can be found on ebay

It’s perfect, it’s plain, it won’t potential be a children’s hazard or something that will make you look like you’re trying to be 10 years younger than you actually are, or were (well we all thought that those designs were cool when you had to make them yourself back then but whatever).

the price for this one varies but roughly goes for $129.99 on ebay or around that neighborhood. I say, worth it.

That price tag tho!

Yes, well, the thing about that is that though the price tag will be high, but the product will be very consistent and the quality of the machine will demonstrate itself through its reliability given that you’ll be putting through it through some very intense applications which is video editing.

That’s it for now

So that’s about it, I leave you to talk to me about anything that you want to change or something that you would like to figure out with me so we can figure out some alteration to what I put together. I say the first thing we should get is the computer case to start as that’s a bit hard to find on the market these days so I’d say that’s the first thing to get, the second thing would be the CPU and then after that we can get everything else with the motherboard being last the reason for that is that return policies for motherboards are usually very tricky - especially when it comes to sending them to manufacturers for repair or replacement.

Stay tuned when I may write about audio and video codecs and containers! Because the days of AMV and flash are long gone and dead. Although AMV has its uses but that’s been wholly replaced by the Matroska container (aka MKV). But more about that some other time.

QA

High Capacity SSDs Good Idea or Bad Idea?

At the moment, anything that is above 2TB, let alone a 1TB SSD, for other than boot drives are a luxury.

The reason for SSDs are to take advantage of a specific part of the performance of desktop applications and that’s the boot up and load times of applications as they are running.

For instance: the booting up of an operating system or the loading times of a video game. That’s the only two popular applications for high capacity SSDs.

This is because of the nature of SSDs that are very strict in their writing and deletion of data. HDDs of higher capacity are much less likely to suddenly breakdown due to usage than SSDs at the cost of overall performance.

I would wait for m.2 and u.2 form-factor SSDs to come down along with 2.5” drive size SSDs to come down in price in terms of 1GB/1USD. If the rate can be dropped to USD pennies to the Gigabyte then you have now a better deal than currently that, yes they have better rates of price falls than HDDs, but the vendor manufacturers make this up by putting more quantities of storage space to effectively sustain from prices falling too low (otherwise they’ll lose revenue for R&D and manufacturing and no one wants that).

So stick something small for now like 512GB or 1TB at most for boot, if you have a video game in mind or some application that you’ll permanently use and seldom update, then fine, go for it.

We can change go with an m.2 ssd to free up a SATA port.

Tower Sizes

A Mid-tower ATX will fit an ATX, uATX, and ITX motherboard I believe so it should be fine. We can further look into first getting the case an finding that old school all aluminum.

Do I need a sound card

No. And that’s the short answer.

Long Answer: During the aughts, motherboard manufacturers tauted “HD” on-board audio that was anything but - this would be usually typical for lower end motherboards but now the development of on-board sound chips have improved so much that you have now you can buy some high-end $300+ headphones and put stuff on blast and, this is most important, the attempts to fix some crosstalk and hum, has improved. Now, that being said, if you’re interested in non-PCM audio such as DSD or DXD, that’s when you have start looking for stuff like DSD supporting DAC (Digital-Analog-Converter) and Amps. One example to consider stuff like Fiio or iFi or even something like an Onkyo TX-NR656 receiver.

But let’s say you buy very high KHz and Kbps audio files from, say Bandcamp.com or you get rips direct from a CD collection, then what would I recommend? I’d say either something like a shielded ASUS soundcard an HT OMEGA eClaro PCIe card or better still, some Schiit. There’s a video on this and it’s really an interesting video to look into if you’re thinking later on to be a part-time or full-time audiophile. I usually just stick to buying portable music players with this Hi-Fi playback support as it’s a cheaper way to test the “difference” in sound for yourself.

By the way did you listen to the Nier:Automata video game soundtrack I gave you? It’s truly awesome.