Kara-Moon Forum

The old Athlon dual core is taking a long time to render digital video, so I'm stepping up to a new custom build, based on the Intel i7 4790 processor - http://ark.intel.com/products/80806/Intel-Core-i7-4790-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_00-GHz - very similar to Moon's i7 4790k, but without the over-clocking abilities.

The motherboard: Asus Z97-A  - http://www.asus.com/ca-en/Motherboards/Z97A/ - ; also very similar to Moon's motherboard.

RAM: 16 gigabytes of Kingston 1600MHz HyperX Fury - http://www.kingston.com/en/hyperx/memory/fury

Graphics card: EVGA GTX 750ti with two gigabytes of DDR5 RAM - http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=02G-P4-3751-KR

Case: Zalman Z5 U3 - http://www.zalman.co.kr/global/product/Product_Read.php?Idx=801

Power supply: 820 watt modular (I can't remember the brand)

Fans: Silicone mounted / 120mm

Looks tasty. What storage are you going to use? My DAW uses a pair of SSDs. One for OS and program/general stuff and the other purely for audio/samples/voice patches

I don't know how old your Athlon computer is,but my latest PC is a dual core and it renders video quite well.I suppose a late model computer has a lot to do with it(in contrast to a PC that is...say,more than 5 years old).
Mine is a HP PC with a 3.4GHz processor,64 bit,1TB HD and 8GB of RAM.Sometimes improving the rendering speed of a video,is as simple as keeping your HD space low and having the latest chipset driver installed.

Also though...not all video editing programs are equal.I have Cyberlink PowerDirector 12 and out of all the video programs I've had,Cyberlink is the most efficient program! 8)

My old Sony Vegas Studio was terrible at rendering video in a timely manner,as the performance would not be the same as Cyberlink,on a PC of equal specs.

Will,

This puppy will get by with a 1 terabyte Western Digital "black"  HDD - 7200rpm with a 64 megabyte cache - http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=760#Tab3
Later, if I want snappier performance, I'll load the O/S onto a separate solid state drive.
Incidentally - what do you think of the idea of installing Linux without a swap partition; given that 16 GB of RAM will be doing all the temporary work? One enthusiast claims that a swap partition actually encourages the O/S to "stammer" back and forth from swap to RAM, slowing the whole process significantly...
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Thom,

It is likely that upgrading the RAM on this oldster from 4 to 8 gigabytes would speed things up considerably. Adding a dedicated graphics card would also help.
The new computer will be a fresh build with all my new ideas incorporated, and will be really frickin' fast. Also, it is designed to be easily upgradeable - unlike the last one I had built. Live and learn, man.  ;D

Having a swap file instead of a partition makes no difference except that the file might be a tad slower. However, with 16gig of memory you'll probably never need to go to swap. I have 8 and last time I checked the swap was totally unused:

 bob$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8060816    7924584     136232     123028     893132    4291908
-/+ buffers/cache:    2739544    5321272
Swap:      8273916         12    8273904


Getting a SSD for boot and system files will impress you! I did that last spring and it's amazing. Don't need a big one either. I have a 64gig and it's still about 1/2 empty. I think I paid around $60 for it.

Oh shit - here we go!  :D

I hear you about the swap file/partition. When I install Ubuntu, I'll avoid creating a swap partition.

This may be the best time to incorporate an SSD, rather than later when the operating system is already on the HDD.
The only aspect that concerns me is whether the SSD just shortens start-up time (which I don't care about - I'll make a cup of tea while my computer gets going  ;) ), or if the O/S on an SSD actually speeds up resource intensive tasks like video rendering. Some more research may be in order.

Thanks for commenting, Bob!

Yes. Much easier! Been there ... done that!


Much faster boot. Nice to have. Plus apps load much faster. Include in this anything the app loads in later.

As far as actually processing video rendering, etc. Nope. But your local computer dealer has a faster CPU which will take care of that :) Just takes money!

The other thing about SSDs is the noise... or rather, it's absence :)
And the other, other thing is the low power consumption - hence lower temperature.

Thanks, Gents, for the true skinny on SSDs and what they can do for me. Quiet, cool, and quick - is good...  :-

I've had the critter for 3 days now. Named it "Nosferatu" after the gent who assembled it - a serious eastern-european who looks like (and sounds like...) Gary Oldman in his roll as Dracula.

... see, you gotta have blue LEDs. Everyone knows blue LEDs work at a higher frequency than old-fashioned green or red ones :P ;D

Yup - I do love blue bling - can't help it! :-

Incidentally - I went for a 16 gigabyte swap partition on the harddrive. Quite a few enthusiasts suggested the extra memory may come in handy during particularly demanding processing, and in the event of a power failure or bizarre accident, most of the current work-in-progress will be saved.  8)

Probably not. Swap is not for saving in progress work. It's used as additional memory when you don't have enough of the real stuff. If I'm wrong here, please let me know.

If you are at all concerned about power failures, etc get a battery backup. They are very cheap these days (less than $100 ... search amazon for UPS). ACP is a very good brand and fully supported by linux. I would not run an important computer in my house for more than a minute without one. When the power goes off, you'll have lots of time to save things.

Bob - there seems to be a lot of mis-information about swap partitions. My drive is big, so I thought "what the hell", and went for it.

The good news: there has been no "stammering" back and forth between  RAM and swap as reported by one Linux user. In fact, the swap partition on this machine has not been used even once, in three days of testing.
I'll remove it once I've executed a resource intensive project and still see no swap action.

Regarding a battery back-up - good idea, of course. I'll look into an ACP, ASAP...  :D

I'd just leave the swap around "just in case". If you have enough RAM you'll never use it ... but you might want to calculate the meaning of life one of these days and then it'll be there :) My main system has 8gig of RAM and I've never gone to swap.

Yes, do get the UPS!

Get an UPS, not an Oops ;D

 O0