Hey hey! I’m building a 4K video / photo editing rig for my folks, who have a ton of 4K footage but an 8-year-old computer that can’t really run the software required to edit any of it.
I’m thinking of building around the AM4 platform and going with a Ryzen 7 2700X for the core of the build. And then the questions start.
Will 64GB of RAM be overkill? What clock speeds for the RAM and any particular models that work out of the box with Ryzen?
How big of a difference does the GPU make? Can I start them off with a 4 GB 1050 Ti and wait until the 1100 series drops to upgrade and will a 1070 give a significant performance boost over say a 1060?
What kind of a hard drive setup am I looking at? Does a M.2 drive make sense, or will SSDs do the trick? RAID HDDs for mass storage and redundancy?
Any particular motherboards that I should be looking at?
I’m looking at a Fractal Design R6 for the case, as it should run things cool and quiet enough and be properly dust filtered, as I know my folks aren’t going to be too keen on cleaning the system out too often. Another case I was looking was the Dark Base Pro 900, as I could flip the layout, so that I could get the glass panel on the right side of the case, since I know the orientation this will be.
The ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate probably has the only feature that would stand out, the 10Gb NIC. So if you need to transfer stuff (and you should always backup your stuff) it won’t take for fucking ever.
For the case I would go with something that can really breath, the Cooler Master H500 looks to be a good choice for that. If you want to minimize dust, just put it up on the table instead of the floor. That will make the biggest difference.
The Silverstone PM01 is also a good choice in terms of being very good with dust filtering.
Threadripper is always a good option, but I’d avoid Intel iGPU acceleration as it causes brightness shift in some footage. If you’re working with LUTs, that’s a nightmare.
64GB of ram is complete overkill, as would 32GB. 16 is what I would suggest for a home video editing rig.
GPU only matters if your video codec is GPU accelerated. Is the 4K video in h.265 or, for some reason, Cineform? If not, no GPU will help you.
Also, the software itself is going to present issues. Adobe software in general only uses 4 CPU cores and loves clock speeds, meaning a 2700X might not be the best tool for the job.
The difference between m.2, SATA, and high end mechanical hard drives on non-GPU accelerated video rendering is negligible, basically the only time you see any difference is using the shingled magnetic recording HDDs which have terrible write performance.
As far as motherboards, for this instance I would suggest anything either built for some longevity or a little bit overkill. A cheaper X370 board or a robust B350.
I went a little internet before coming to me senses.
Considering its for your parents. And Adobe. My novice Opinion. Based on Adobe and windows.
Get a Ryzen 2600X system 32G if budget allows otherwise 16G min. 1TB NVME drive for the OS and scratch disk.
For storage considering their starting with 1.7TB of media a single 6TB or larger HD will be fine.
Now as a son you have to set up some good solid backup method. If the internet speed is good enough a cloud storage is a out of your hands option, or external connected storage. A NAS is nice but that’s a whole new machine that needs a backup also.
These are family shots and footage so the backup is important because the data set is starting at 1.7TB.
As to Adobe. Is shit software and will work fine for you parents. Video card does not matter get a good solid budget AMD or Nvidia card with 4GB ram.
Fractal cases are good quality. As to the rest of the build I only know first hand what I have used myself and I get one system every 3-5 years. A good brand PSU 500-700W is overkill and safe.
Remember I am an internet Bozo but I put a little thought into it. Backups are the key. Don’t let them lose data.
Personally I don’t think having the scratch disc on your Primary boot drive is a good idea. I would use a separate SSD for the scratch and put the OS on a 250-500GB. Also snagging a couple 2TB drives would help, that way they can have a drive for unprocessed media and a drive for processed (That’s how I do it).
But also 32GB of memory would be a good spot for them in the long run and the 2600(x) is a strong CPU to use or you can drop to a 1700(x) for around the same price and that would allow them an upgrade path down the road. The Define R6 is an amazing case with alot of versatility.
For a GPU even a 9** series card would be more than enough (970-980) since you can find them for a good price now-a-days. Since Adobe does love the Cuda’s
Scatch being temporary = doesn’t matter of the OS disk dies and takes it with it. An m.2 NVME drive will be plenty fast enough to handle both tasks.
Having seperate drives means that you will end up with less usable contiguous space.
This is a windows home editing rig, not a unix server that you’re trying to use mount options for different areas of the filesystem on. And if you really want a seperate drive for system, you can use a partition…
True it being temporary, but you have to think about the amount of writes that will hit that NVMe drive (most dont have the highest endurance rates - on the more budget friendly side of things). Personally I’d rather a separate drive die not taking my OS and programs with it and possible important documents that haven’t had the chance to be backed up yet. And how would it have less space if you use a standalone drive, you have me scratching my head there.
My editing rig is Windows based as well, and as the OP mentioned it would be too
Not really. SSD torture tests over the past 5 years have proven that to get anywhere close to nuking a contemporary SSD you’d need to be basically re-writing flat out to the drive all day, every day for many months. And that was on the 256 GB drives from say 2012 (samsung 840 evo 250 GB (not pro, that lasted longer) was one of the drives tested - that survived well over 2 PB of writes IIRC). Larger capacity drives with more flash will survive longer.
So no, you do not need to worry about SSD wear in an end user desktop in 2018. Plan for failure, sure. But it is very, very unlikely to be NAND wear related.
Enterprise storage array? Maybe. But you have redundancy there anyway. Desktop/notebook not so much these days.
edit:
it wasn’t the 840 evo that survived 2 PB.
torture test here:
The old 840 Pro 256 GB survived 2.4 PB of writes. Modern drives are better. Planning to generate / process several petabytes of footage inside a few years?
To be able to do that you’ll have to spend way more time out there shooting video than editing it…
completely depends on how aggressively you cache footage. For example, I use a ram scratchdisk to avoid proxy transcodes and to increase responsiveness on IO intensive projects. I also use a ZFS ARC/ZIl on my experimental linux rig to increase overall performance. being aable to max out your built-in caching and add some on top via other means is a really nice ability to have
that said, even if you are taking advantage of these external caches, 32gb is definitely the practical limit.
as for SSDs, nothing wrong with sata, especially with the current prices of large volume NVMe drives at the moment. Saturating the writes on 1:1 dedicated scratch to render SSD setup is hard regardless of the resolution
While premiere may not take advantage of any GPU acceleration, many other programs do, and I’d recommend either an entry level AMD WX or and nvidia consumer card @ 1060 or higher (some programs will refuse to work on nvidia entry level) just in case your friend wants to do some external postprocessing.
For case look at Silverstone redline06 pro. It comes with 3 fans on front, 1 in rear and keeps things as cool as a cucumber. It’s one of the best GN has tested and only 90ish dollars. Front is easy on and off and filters do their job well, clean out 1st of month, no big deal.
If you want a budget consideration the corsair 200r is probably the absolute best value at the lower end of the scale. all Steel construction, plenty of fan mounts, easy installation for everything else, and a bracket exposing mobo tray.
The version without the window regularly retails for 50$ or less
