Video Editing Workstation Specification
It’s time to put together a brand new workstation PC to help me boost productivity when video editing, photoshopping, VM testing, web design, VTPro design and of course relaxing by playing the latest games at a decent resolution and speed. Since quite a few people have asked me recently what I would recommend, I thought I’d share my current ideas with you. More after the break.
All links and prices as of 26 July 2010 and provided by www.overclockers.co.uk; Prices exclusive of VAT and shipping; I am not affiliated with Overclockers UK and nor receive remuneration for referring readers to their website.
CPU
First, we need to determine a suitable processor and the only one that currently offers the best performance at an affordable price is the Intel i7 930 2.8Ghz CPU.
Cost: £184.99 excl.
In case you wonder, the next one up from the 930 is the 960 which currently runs you a cool £385.52 exclusive of VAT. Alternatively you could go with Xeon but I find the i7 gives me better all-round performance.
Motherboard
The motherboard (mainboard) needs to not only give me room to upgrade to a faster processor but also provide the bulk of features my new workhorse needs. We want SATA3 which offers us a staggering 6Gbit/s of bandwidth to connect our hard drives with. We also need a decent sound card and room for at least three PCIe x16 cards for expansion. Since we also need fast external storage connected to our rig, we should look for brand new and super fast USB3 ports.
I have picked the Asus P6X58D-E which offers us everything that we need and more. 2x SATA3, 2x USB3 ports, 3x PCIe 16, support for tripple channel RAM with up to 1600mhz. It also has 6x SATA2 ports (RAID0,1,5,10) and 8x USB2 ports.
Cost: £127.65
Main System Hard Drive
Speaking of speed, I really love my Crucial C300 256GB SSD drive in the Sony Vaio workstation laptop but for the desktop a smaller version will suffice as we can add another drive for our work files. So the C300 64GB 2.5″ SSD SATA3 drive it is 
In case you wonder, it is one of the fastest drives out there and combined with the 6Gbit/s interface… it just flies! You wouldn’t want it for your work files though. We are simply going to use it for Windows 7 and our apps. If you really wanted more space and performance (who could resist?), just add two of these puppies and you’ll be breaking every sensible speed barrier.
Cost: £99.99
Work Files Hard Drive
The drive to pick to do work on needs to be big but also damn fast. Since we only have 2x SATA3 ports we have to make a choice as to whether we can afford to add a SATA3 PCIe adapter card and more SSD drives but reduce the usable space (unless you have a _big_ budget) or get both sufficient speeds and more than enough space for several HD video projects to work on at the same time.
We will go the tried and tested route with two Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB drives, providing us with around 270MB/sec sustained write speeds in RAID0 (striped).
Cost: £41.27 x2 (£82.54)
Just for fun: Samsung F3 RAID 0 benchmarks and a comparison with a Corsair Nova 32GB SSD (not even that fast an SSD when compared with a C300 I might add). A review and benchmarks for the C300 can be found at www.benchmarkreviews.com.
Memory
Hard drive speed is meaningless if your workstation cannot serve data to the processor quickly. Thanks to triple channel DDR3 running at 1600mhz that shouldn’t be a problem. However, we want loads of it so we might need to compromise again as that type of RAM is very dear.
OCZ Gold LV 6GB (3x 2GB) memory can be had for £136.16 and provides us with an excuse to buy two sets for just a little under £300 excluding VAT. Considering that RAM is probably the most important component apart we need, it is money well invested.
Cost: £136.16 per 6GB set (x2 £272.32)
Graphics Card
If you are working in graphics or video you need to look at the right graphics card for your editing workstation. Back in the good old days it was easy: just pick whatever model Nvidia Quadro FX you could afford.
Nowadays, especially with CS5′s CUDA support, any of the new graphics cards will do nicely and allow you to relax with a good game at a fantastic resolution
My choice is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 with 1GB vRAM and factory overclocked. Hardware support is build-in to support the latest video codecs and provide smooth scrubbing as well as prompt rendering.
Cost: £179.99
Power Supply
Our new workstation is nearly complete now. Just time to finish it off by picking the last vital component: the power supply. Choose the wrong one and your system won’t even boot. Or it will crash a lot.
Make mine a Corsair TX750W ATX and rest assured to have enough grunt even for two graphics cards (SLI) and another big, fast hard drive.
Cost: £89.35
CPU Cooler
Since noise is a major concern, especially when editing videos or trying to concentrate while removing spots and red-eyes in Lightroom, I have selected a Corsair H50-1 high performance CPU watercooler to help run the i7 CPU quietly. This is a pre-build cooler and only needs attaching to the CPU. It’s self-contained so you don’t need to worry about maintaining it either.
Cost: £51.05
eSATA
Lastly, I need something to hook up my eSATA RAID1 workbench that I use to offload and edit on-location as well as my BluRay writer which uses eSATA too. And my backup hard drives… . Since I have more than enough ports on the motherboard, all I need is a LianLi BZ-U05B USB2 and eSATA 5.25″ converter which fits into a spare drive slot in my case. It’s a nice, unobtrusive black to match the case and combined USB/eSATA ports.
For good measure I will get an Akasa SATA to eSATA adapter for the rear of the case, to which my BluRay writer will mostly likely remain connected permanently.
Monitor
Although I already own a very nice Dell 24″ LCD monitor – the 2407WFP-HC – I cannot help but noticing that it is a very crowed workspace! Even at 1920x1200px resolution I can barely write this article without gasping for air 
Suffice to say that it is barely a suitable size for editing 1080HD videos, hence my eyes and heart are set on the bigger brother – Dell’s excellent 3008WFP with a screen resolution of 2560x1600px. More than enough room for previewing a clip in its proper resolution and yet have space for various bits like a time line or bins! And I can always use the 24″ for further palettes.
Summing Up
Before you ask, I already have a suitable Sharkoon Rebel 9 case which I intend to use for this system. The grand total of the above parts will run to £2,059.24 exclusive of VAT (plus £16.85 shipping). That’s for one heck of a fast system and includes a brand new 30″ monitor! Not bad for just over £2,000 (excl).
Of course, I do already own software and have a big bad NAS on which I store my media, as well as a fantastic BluRay writer with which to back them up. If you were to add a case, NAS and BluRay you would be just short of £3,000 (excl) depending on how big a data store you want to have.
Mine is running on a Linux box with 4x 1.5TB drives and there’s another with 4x 1TB drives = gross total of 10TB. I don’t use RAID, I use simple, fast duplication so I get the most from it too and it creates redundant copies
Enough of the geekery already. Time to flex the plastic and take a deep breath…
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