Building a work horse busniss PC, need help!!

[river686]

i am building a workhorse business PC. running audio, video media applications, no gaming purposes. may be using pro tools for audio recording and video production and editing. i need a good multi tasker without freezing, errors, etc. now, my problem is picking a CPU. i have already established that it should be a quad core, but im not sure about the brand. also if you can recommend any other components that would be grate! thanks.

 

[jennyh]

Anything for non gaming use, buy an i7 920/930.

That's if you need it within the next month. If you don't, wait and see how the new AMD Thuban 6-cores perform.

If history is anything to go by (it is), you will get more while paying less for the AMD system. If you need it now, get the i7 already.

 

[river686]

im trying to keep the build around 1000 more or less. what about AMD X4 vs i5 quad core and i7?

 

[LePhuronn]

If you absolutely needs it now, go i7 920/930.

I do agree partly with jennyh in waiting to see how the 6-core AMD chip performs, but given that it's the same architecture as the existing quad-core Phenom IIs it'll probably get crushed by the i7 in heavy-duty stuff like the video editing you want to do.

There is always the 6-core i7 980X but that's stupid money, however in the next 6 months the i7 970 is out which is also a 6-core and should cost around the same as the i7 960.

Budget and ideal purchase date would be useful now.

 

[river686]

i will not be including a monitor. but i also am wondering if a 64 bit operating system is a must?

 

[river686]

also i think i have decided on an i7 or i5.

 

[river686]

true. but i am going to max my budget with 4 GB. but im a little confused about 32 bit operating systems and how much RAM they can really utilize- virtual memory and usable, is where i get confused.

 

[jennyh]

With 4gb 32-bit is fine. Don't forget 64-bit drivers are still very poor comparitively and novice users are better off with 32-bit still.

With 6-8gb memory, sure 64-bit OS is a no-brainer.

 

[river686]

ok thanks for clearing that up, now im having some trouble deciding on a video card, $120 for low low-mid range workstation card or $80 for something like a GT 240.

 

[jennyh]

Not sure about workstation cards, a 5670 is better than a gt240 I think, but I can't remember for sure.

 

[popatim]

32 bit OS can address 4Gb of memory. this would include all memory addresses such as those for your video card, motherboard, i/o ... if you have a 512mb video card then the OS would be left with somewhere between 3 and 3.5Gb of addressable space typically.

Virtual memory is used by the OS and always references 4GB no matter how much ram you really have. 2gb of virtual memory is available to each process and the other 2gb is shared between the OS and kernal processes. While most never come close to the 2gb's of virtual ram - it is available. The OS keep s track of whats actually is in use and assigns real Ram in 4k pages for the job. Once real ram space gets full it will use the hard drive as virtual ram and swap jobs in & out as they need cpu time.

So you see that you can never (with windows at least) not use virtual ram, but you can have enough ram to never use the swap file. In windows this is the pagefile.

As for your build. With only a $1k budget,I would have you look into the apps you plan on using to make sure they all work with quad cores and any issues with brand of processor?

Next look into what video card you migh need, this could break the bank, some of the professional cards are quite expensive but you may be able to get away with a 4850 to use CS4's graphics processing capabilities.

Then you need to look into your hardrive requirements. Most video editing builds call for at least 3 drives. This is possibly another budget buster depending on what you need. And then if you're looking to edit HD they recommend a hardware raid 0 implementation so now your talking many more $$$ just for a hardware raid controller....

Happy Building.