$1000 - 1500 First Build for Multimedia

[anotherday46]

APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: Within the next 2 - 4 days

BUDGET RANGE: 1000 - 1500 after rebates

SYSTEM USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: Maya 2011, Adobe CS5, Programming on the GPU / Real time Rendering, 3DS Max, Lite Gaming, Wathching Movies

PARTS NOT REQUIRED: keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers, OS

PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: Newegg, Microcenter, or open to any others

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: USA

PARTS PREFERENCES: Intel I7 860 or 930

OVERCLOCKING: Yes

SLI OR CROSSFIRE:No

MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1280x1024

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: Quiet


This is my first build so I'm not exactly sure what makes some parts better than others. I've been reading about the differences between the 860 and the 930 and came up with a few parts for both since I still can't seem to make up my mind. Since the 860 would ultimately be about 100 dollars cheaper, is that worth it? I was really wondering if you could help me narrow down my choices for what would be best for what I am using the computer for. I'd love to be able to use it for about 3-4 years.

860 build:

CPU: Intel i7 860 $219
Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-P55-USB3 $120
RAM: 8 Gbs. corsair? I don't really know how to narrow it down here at all.
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 460 $243
Case: NZXT Zero 2 $104
NZXT Guardian 921 $110
Or any other case that you may reccomend.
PSU: Honestly, I don't know anything about power supply, and even after reading about them I'm not sure which is best. So I'd love any input on this.
Hard Drive: WD Caviar Black 1TB
DVD drive: any

The difference for the 930 build would be:

CPU: Intel i7 930 $200
Mobo: ASUS P6X58D Premium $289
RAM: 6 gb.

So if anyone has any thoughts on any parts I've picked, or any I should get, I would very much appreciate it. The only thing other than performance that I'd really like is I would like is a relatively quiet system. Also, I am interested in overclocking, but I have never overclocked before. So help with good cooling would be appreciated as well, although I don't want to go to water cooling.

Thank you so much!

 

[batuchka]

http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/reviews/a-case-for-gpu-computing-adobe-premiere-pro-cs5-and-the-mercury-playback-engine/
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/performance/

Mercury brings performance gains on all of the GPUs supported today in CS5. If you're upgrading your system today and want to get the most out of your configuration, the following graphics cards offer significant additional acceleration by the Mercury Playback Engine:

GeForce GTX 285 (Windows and Mac OS)
Quadro FX 3800 (Windows)
Quadro FX 4800 (Windows and Mac OS)
Quadro FX 5800 (Windows)
Quadro CX
Adobe is planning to support additional cards in the future, including some of the new NVIDIA solutions based on the upcoming Fermi parallel computing architecture.

This project consists of compressed 640×480 video footage. These small video files were being eaten alive by the massive 1090T hexa-core processor and 8GB of RAM. Premiere Pro CS5′s increased performance with multi-core systems coupled with bleeding fast hardware will make fast work of any simple projects such as this, not giving the GPU enough work to really make a difference. These results do suggest that if you’re editing small-time video footage, you will not benefit much from using Mercury Playback.

I would await mainstream GPUs to appear on that list of supported Mercury engine cards ^^ This would ultimately depend on scale of jobs/level of seriousness/etc Am eyeing GTX 460 but in the meantime:

 

[anotherday46]

Hey, thanks for the reply. I have a few questions on this though. For one, would the SSD be very beneficial? I'm not entirely sure all that it does other than quick start ups. But I just don't know much about them. Also, is SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0 going to help also. Maybe it's just my speculation, but it seems there aren't many items with SATA 6 Gb/s and USB 3.0 to make that very important? But again, I really have no idea.

I don't think I want to go AMD though, I had an AMD and Intel in the past, and the I was much happier with the Intel.

And it might be worth waiting a bit on the video card. But while I will be creating animations, I'm not sure how large they will be in reality. So maybe that won't benefit me anyway. Thank you for the article though! It was very informative!