Need help configuring a Video Editing PC Please

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I plan to order parts this Friday and I really dont know what direction to go in. I been researching for awhile and it seems to be know definitive answer so maybe you guys can help give me some insight. I have two builds some what similiar but priced different. Here is what I have 

 

CPU: Intel Core i7-3930K 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor ($499.99 @ Microcenter)

CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i 77.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($99.99 @ Newegg)

Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X79 ATX LGA2011 Motherboard ($324.99 @ Amazon)

Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($234.99 @ Newegg)

Storage: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($129.99 @ NCIX US)

Storage: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($129.99 @ NCIX US)

Storage: Samsung 840 Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($169.99 @ Microcenter)

Storage: Samsung 840 Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($169.99 @ Microcenter)

Storage: Sandisk Ultra Plus 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($89.99 @ Newegg)

Video Card: Galaxy GeForce GTX 670 2GB Video Card ($373.98 @ Newegg)

Case: Thermaltake VN300M1W2N ATX Full Tower Case ($124.99 @ Newegg)

Case Fan: Rosewill RFX-120BL 87.5 CFM 120mm Fan ($9.99 @ Amazon)

Case Fan: Rosewill RFX-120BL 87.5 CFM 120mm Fan ($9.99 @ Amazon)

Power Supply: Corsair Professional Gold 750W 80 PLUS Gold Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ($134.99 @ Amazon)

Optical Drive: LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer ($65.77 @ NCIX US)

Other: Mini PCI-E to PCI-E Wireless Card w/ 3 Antennas ($10.37)

Other: Apple AirPort Extreme Card for Mac Pro ($40.00)
Total: $2619.99

I was thinking this would be a solid build but I think I can shave some cash off of this so I went with this 


CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($229.99 @ Microcenter)

CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i 77.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($99.99 @ Newegg)

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($179.99 @ Newegg)

Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($229.99 @ Newegg)

Storage: Crucial M4 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($115.99 @ Amazon)

Storage: Crucial M4 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($115.99 @ Amazon)

Storage: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($129.99 @ NCIX US)

Storage: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($129.99 @ NCIX US)

Storage: Samsung 840 Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($89.99 @ NCIX US)

Video Card: Galaxy GeForce GTX 670 2GB Video Card ($373.98 @ Newegg)

Sound Card: Creative Labs Audigy SE 24-bit 96 KHz Sound Card ($21.99 @ Newegg)

Case: Thermaltake VN300M1W2N ATX Full Tower Case ($124.99 @ Newegg)

Case Fan: Rosewill RFX-120BL 87.5 CFM 120mm Fan ($9.99 @ Amazon)

Case Fan: Rosewill RFX-120BL 87.5 CFM 120mm Fan ($9.99 @ Amazon)

Power Supply: Corsair Professional Gold 750W 80 PLUS Gold Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ($134.99 @ Amazon)

Optical Drive: LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer ($65.77 @ NCIX US)

Other: Mini PCI-E to PCI-E Wireless Card w/ 3 Antennas ($10.37)

Other: Apple AirPort Extreme Card for Mac Pro ($40.00)

Total: $2113.98

I really want to keep it around 1500-2000 but I dont want to sacrifice speed. I'm not really worried about render times but I do want smooth real time playback and stuff. PLEASE HELP lol 

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I don't have compaints with either build, the 670 is a great work horse kind of low on VRAM for my taste, i'd shoot for a 3gb or 4gb card.

You don't need an h100, and that case is overkill/ugly as balls.

The SSD's in raid seem like a good idea, and i like the 128gb cache/boot you have on the top build, might not be the best price performance option on the table but you haven't really mentioned what storage configuration you're going for.

The 3770k will become a limit on this build, in my experience the processor is the most valuable asset for editing and while i think it'll be able to handle realtime previews and all that jazz, i'm not sure if it's got all the horse power you need. The 3930k does.

If you're concerned with a sound card, either buy a top end asus crosshair/formula board or an asus sound card, creative labs is garbage (not hardware buy software).

If you use a 3930k you wont be able to keep it under 2k will all those SSD's

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/M9qu

This is the skeleton, you add the SSD's you want, i don't really know what's for what. Also didn't add wireless cards because i'm lazy, Use any case you like, i just chose the r2 XL for its size/drive bays.

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I personally edit with a 3770k, and I don't see what is so bad about it. I get stellar performance out of my system for editing in Photoshop (3770k and 680 4GB), but I don't do any video editing (yet), until I buy the Adobe Creative Suite. Why is the 3770k going to be "bad" for editing? Obviously, the 6-core 3930k will be better, but how is a 3770k going to be a limitation?

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no offense but your 3770k at sock for stock can't render that much faster than my cpu and mines a phenom x6, it will pull ahead by by about 2mins in vegas for for about a 15min video. not that great consider how much more it costs, but still video rendering require's alot of cpu pull, the more cores the better. 

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Basically what thanos said, imagine editing a video like applying a filter to every frame on your stock footage.  It's not that bad when you only have to apply the filter once, but imagine applying many filters 24 times a second, that's the final render.

That's not even the worst bit, because when you're working on footage you need to be able to see in real time how your edits are going to look with some degree of accuracy/visability. Every "preview" preset basically renders out as much of the footage/filters as the processor can handle in real time so you can see the effects.

Editing on an i7-930 i can get decent frame rates when i'm looking at some medium/draft quality previews but that's only with some minor edits. Sometimes I literally have to sit at my desk for around 3-5 minutes when i'm working in after effects so that my preview can render to a level of quality that can allow me to pull info from.

The 3770k is a beast of a chip, and will drive his workstation flawlessly, but it's not going to be able to give him decent real time renders and the actual act of editing video. Basically when the 3770k hits 100% load, it will not be doing enough work.

 

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thanks for the feed back I think I will hold off on the ssd raid for now and add that in 2 weeks or so. The case design wasnt really appealing but I like the idea of the ssd hot swap dock on the top I can use to offload footage from my black magic cinema camera. Any other cases you recommend? thanks again 

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I edit on my phenom ii x4 820 and a gtx 660 ti with mercury playback engine, CUDA acceleration. Real time playback is extremely smooth and it works in real time in premiere pro cs6. Unless I'm trying to have 9 miniature screens of footage playing simultaneously on the same screen it works fine. Just want to throw that out there. Not sure what software you're using but I'm pretty sure most of the cpu power only goes into rendering it (render times) not in terms of smooth playback. 

Go with the fanciest schmanciest coolest looking case you can find, for me that'd probably be a fractal design r4 or something. You have ~$2000 to spend why not get a good one. For a $30 case you have to look around for something good but there's tons of options. :P

But op, do you really not care about render times? If so you don't need to dish out $500 on a 3930k XD. Go on the adobe forums, or vegas forums or whatever other editing program you use forums haha. I heard from people on there that SSDs aren't very worthwile for video editing. Also dave dougdale with his new pc build video, I believe he used a couple 3tb HDDs for storage, raided together, and then had a 480gb SSD for scratch disk (thought I still don't know aobut this, wouldn't the continuous read writes make the short life span even shorter??), and then another 480gb one for OS and then another hard drive for exports I believe. But hard drive setups for video editing are really complicated.

Oh, the rosewill blackhawk and cm690 both have some pretty cool hot swop docks on the top. But I'd personally just open up the case and put it in lol. Congrats on the BMCC, my T2i sucks. Wish I had one haha.

In adobes CS6, all the rendering work is done on the graphics card. So my 660 ti is at 100% usage most of the time, rendering all of the effects and filters I have on my footage. But if vegas uses cpu to render that, or whatever program you use, then you're kind of screwed. Lol.

 
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Ok so in the OP you didnt even tell which editing program(s) you use. 

Also those SSDs are not exactly very fast, but I really dont think that matters. Most of video editing is going to be limited by the RAM speed, and the cpu speed. Maybe for scratch disks, but to buy like $500 worth of ssds is really overkill in my mind. 

For hard drives go with the segate 7200.14 hdds. They can do up to like 195mbps sequential, which is insane. Best hard drives ever. Not sure the exact part numbers, but you can just look up 7200.14 on newegg and get the 3tb version for $130 (or ncix or amazon or whatever else). Video editing, if not concerned with render times, is realy not that much cpu limited. When I'm playing back my dslr footage (2.5k bmcc would probably be more, but really thats probably just processed by the gpu. Probably will take more cpu strain, so a 680 or titan or something might be a good idea, not sure), the gpu goes at 100% (assuming I have curves, levels, some sharpening, a bit of color correction (3 way), maybe some filters and film grain) but the cpu is a lot lower, maybe 30% or 50%. The only time it goes up to 100% usage (meaning a slower cpu will limit it, since it uses 100% of the cpus power, faster will be more power) is when I render it out. But this site, PPBM5, I believe its called, has a ton of benchmarks for encoding times and stuff. I'd have to check it out but I really doubt going from a say 3770k to a 3930k would cut render times in half, or be that much of an improvement. But again I am just some high school kid, talk to the pros and experts somewhere else haha.

 
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+1 to this, i'm just offering up the best you will be able to do within your budget not really sure what your specific workload or needs are.

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Definitely. Your build looked pretty nice with the 3930k. I'm basically just saying that he might not need all of that. But the gpu, hdds, case, psu, sound card, all of it was really good quality. Would be a killer rig.

 
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Sorry about that yea I use CS6 AE, PP and PS.  I heard or read somewhere that Media Encoder actually renders faster if you queue from either AE or PP. After wiggling around parts, deals and research I got my build done to hover around 1900-2100 on a 3930k build and around 1600-1700 on the 3770k build and I asked around on a few other forums and majority said for heavy video editing go with the 3930k for the extra cores and multithreading. I dropped the ssd raid 0 config went with hdds and got one ssd for applications. Then I'll just archive master files on an external and be done with it

Starting with 32GB of Gskill since the patriots are back ordered. Will probably pick up another 32GB of gskill in a few weeks thinking of toying around with a 48GB ramdisk read good things about those. I heard its not good to mix separate sticks of ram because they might not be from the same production line. So is it best to just buy 64GB outright?

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For heavy video editing the 3930k is definitely better, however in what way matters a lot. It will be able to render the timeline in a lot less time. So if it takes 10 minutes normally maybe its like 6 mins or something. It won't magically make it smoother or anything. The ssd for applications is pretty good, i always like a128gb ssd for os programs and stuff. Another thing for premiere is that it benefits from multiple hard drives, used as scratch disks, page files, project files, exports, etc.

Here's an article on it, this guy harm milaard is very helpful at this stuff and you can also try out ppbm5 to see how different rigs compare. So like comparing a 680 with a 670 or 660 ti or something. And then a 3770k vs a 3770k overclocked vs 3930k vs a slower cpu. Dunno about the ram thing. Will you really need 64gb haha?

 
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Make a thread on the adobe premiere forums (and maybe photoshop and ae) about this. They'll know what speeds up a system most. But for smooth playback it really doesn't matter about the specs. What matters most is having an easy format to read, like prores and not like h.264. Then the gpu will make it smooth as butter. My gtx 660 ti works great on all my dslr footage even if I hjavent transcoded it to prores or anotehr format. The only downside is the render times, since my cpu is a crappy old phenom ii x4 at 2.8ghz its not nearly as fast as a 3930k or even a 3770k.

 
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Its funny you said that I spent all last night on the adobe forums and ppbm5 before I seen your post. Harm is an Adobe whisperer lol. They got me situated on my build though and the 64GB of Ram I was going to play around with a ramdisk really no other reason. I'll start with the 32 gigs to save some cash and in a few months upgrade to 64. Thanks for all the info and insight. 

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Haha ok good. 64gb ram is pretty insane lol. What kind of hard drive setup are you going to do?