I'm coming into some money mid-March and want to buy a premium rig for video editing/encoding, gaming and audio processing. Build time is late April 2012. No hard upper limit on cost; maybe $5k or $6k.
According to this the CPU I want is the SandyBridge Intel Core i7-3930K @ 3.20GHz (the pricing doubling for the 3960 hardly seems worth the $500).
I'm completely lost on a motherboard. Any guidance would be appreciated. RAID not necessary. USB 3.0, SATA 3 are necessary. Video and audio chipsets not necessary since I'll be plugging in PCI-E cards.
My current system is WinXP, but clearly I want to use Win7 with the new rig to take advantage of the 64bit architecture. I plan on far, far, far exceeding WinXP's 3.25GB. Video editing has been miserable and painful under 3.25 GB. I'm thinking 16GB would be more than enough for my needs. Any RAM suggestions? I'm sure any company and model would be OK for all the new games out there; I'm mostly interested in video editing and video encoding.
Video card: I don't know what to get either. From browsing Google, it sounds like what I want is the eVGA GeForce GTX 590 Classified Graphics card, with 3 GB of onboard RAM.
Hard Drives: I want SSD's. My current C drive is 159GB and current D drive is 400 GB, but there's a lot of stuff that could go onto non-SSD drives, like Mathematica, Nero Suite, etc. 1TB SSD's are ridiculously priced, but 512GB SSDs seem reasonable. I'm thinking two 512GB SSD's (looks cheaper than 1TB SSD) and a couple of 2 TB SATA 3.0 drives. Any recommendations?
Any case recommendations? I like fancy cases, but I like convenient cases better. Tool-free cases rock. Plus, some cases look convenient but when I go to swap out drives I need to start unplugging stuff. I really hate that. I much prefer convenience.
Any PSU recommendations?
Any recommendations for audio cards? I want a 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound card that's good for gaming and audio processing. I plan on hooking up "real" speakers (i.e. something better than your typical mediocre computer audio speakers)
As a last note, I understand that things change a lot. Are there any new technologies that are slated to be released around April 2012 that would change any of my decisions? I don't believe NVidia will be releasing anything new anytime soon.
I know this is all sketchy. I'm trying to get an overall feel for what I should be looking at, and I'll be refining my choices over the next month or so.
According to this the CPU I want is the SandyBridge Intel Core i7-3930K @ 3.20GHz (the pricing doubling for the 3960 hardly seems worth the $500).
I'm completely lost on a motherboard. Any guidance would be appreciated. RAID not necessary. USB 3.0, SATA 3 are necessary. Video and audio chipsets not necessary since I'll be plugging in PCI-E cards.
My current system is WinXP, but clearly I want to use Win7 with the new rig to take advantage of the 64bit architecture. I plan on far, far, far exceeding WinXP's 3.25GB. Video editing has been miserable and painful under 3.25 GB. I'm thinking 16GB would be more than enough for my needs. Any RAM suggestions? I'm sure any company and model would be OK for all the new games out there; I'm mostly interested in video editing and video encoding.
Video card: I don't know what to get either. From browsing Google, it sounds like what I want is the eVGA GeForce GTX 590 Classified Graphics card, with 3 GB of onboard RAM.
Hard Drives: I want SSD's. My current C drive is 159GB and current D drive is 400 GB, but there's a lot of stuff that could go onto non-SSD drives, like Mathematica, Nero Suite, etc. 1TB SSD's are ridiculously priced, but 512GB SSDs seem reasonable. I'm thinking two 512GB SSD's (looks cheaper than 1TB SSD) and a couple of 2 TB SATA 3.0 drives. Any recommendations?
Any case recommendations? I like fancy cases, but I like convenient cases better. Tool-free cases rock. Plus, some cases look convenient but when I go to swap out drives I need to start unplugging stuff. I really hate that. I much prefer convenience.
Any PSU recommendations?
Any recommendations for audio cards? I want a 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound card that's good for gaming and audio processing. I plan on hooking up "real" speakers (i.e. something better than your typical mediocre computer audio speakers)
As a last note, I understand that things change a lot. Are there any new technologies that are slated to be released around April 2012 that would change any of my decisions? I don't believe NVidia will be releasing anything new anytime soon.
I know this is all sketchy. I'm trying to get an overall feel for what I should be looking at, and I'll be refining my choices over the next month or so.