Need HELP building 4k Editing PC

[PatrickFaith]

I have quadra 4000, gtx 560, and the new 690 ... I haven't noticed any speed difference in transcoding ... so I'd go with the 570 unless your doing a lot of 3d graphics/raytracing compositing.
Make sure you get the board that has external esata ports, esata ROCKS. I run 24 tbytes of esata on gspeed (in two 12 terabyte chunks). Seems to me you always need more disk then you'd think.
I am moving from 32 gig of ram to 48 gig on my newer machines(12x 3 gig of ram is required for fully using after effects at 4k).
For my new machines i dropped from the 3960x to to the 3930k (the critical thing of the 3930 is the 4x bus , which is better then the 3770 ... but 3770 is a great price point [higher end bus is needed for the gtx690 though]).

Cory Petkovsek mentions your bottle neck will be with i/o, I 100% agree ... for the under $2.5k I'd downgrade to 3770 and have higher end disk and ram, then have low end i/o and fast cpu - depends on your price point though.
No matter what, your not going to transcode r3d @1:1 realtime without a red rocket board ( I normally run at 1/4 res on r3d fine in all my setups).

[JJ Rok]

Thanks again for all of the responses! I think you guys are right, the 3770 seems like a better choice based on budget. That way I can afford to use SSDs to edit off of and save up for a RAID array down the line, while backing up to cheap USB drives now. I have no experience building a pc, so my plan is to buy it custom built online. I found that www.computerlx.com offers the components I'm looking at at a reasonable price. Does anyone have any experience with them?

As of now my list looks like this:

i7-3770k
Corsair Liquid Cooling (either H60, H80, or H100) - not sure what the major differences are yet
Asus MAXIMUS V EXTREME LGA1155/Intel Z77
32GB (4x8GB) 1600mhz RAM
SSD Boot Drive - 240/256GB
nVIDIA GeForce GTX570 2.5GB
(2) SSD Editing Drives - 480/512GB
Power Supply - 800-1000w

I want to order this week, so I am looking to decide on the final components. I can get this all through www.computerlx.com expect I would buy the 2 larger SSDs separately and install them myself.

Remaining questions:

1) Which Corsair liquid cooling system will suffice? I assume the H100 is best, but with the budget getting tight would saving money on the H60 or H80 be better?

2) How much power do I need?

3) What SSDs to buy?

--- BOOT DRIVE --- I'm thinking a 240/256GB is the right size, but maybe I could get away with a 128GB. Some options are the Kingston, Kingston HyperX, Crucial, and Corsair 240GBs.

--- EDIT DRIVES --- The general consensus seems to be that my money is best spent on quality i/o. So I have decided to go with 2 SSDs of about 500GB each. There are some very interesting options on amazon, any advice on the following would be great.

Corsair 480 GB Force Series 3 SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive - CSSD-F480GB3-BK

Crucial 512 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT512M4SSD2

SanDisk Extreme SSD 480 GB SATA 6.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SDSSDX-480G-G25

Corsair 480 GB Force Series GT SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive - CSSD-F480GBGT-BK

OCZ 512GB Vertex 4 Industry's Highest I/O Performance Up to 120K IOPS SATA 6.0 GB/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive With 5-Year Warranty - VTX4-25SAT3-512G.M

OCZ Technology 512GB Agility 4 Series SATA 6Gb/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive( SSD) With Up to 420 MB/s Read And 85K Max.IOPS- AGT4-25SAT3-512G

I know the Vertex is supposed to be one of the best, but how does it compare to the other brands that are a little cheaper?

[JJ Rok]

anyone with suggestion on the above?

[PatrickFaith]

anyone with suggestion on the above?

Seems a bit heavy on SSD, maybe change one SSD with a 2 Tbyte drive? On SSD, there is a huge range of performance on those drives, and some of them totally suck after the first month of heavy use(there is a weird performance degradation on the cheaper ones), so go with fewer more expensive then multiple cheap(hopefully your windows clone guy knows the difference).

Good choice on the 32 gig ram, after a bit of running, windows caches the most used disk, so this ends up being great. For over 16 gig, at least in the US, I'm perty sure you need to go with windows professional edition (if you get the home, you need to upgrade to pro to use all 32 gig - it's normally cheaper for your clone guy to install the pro version right off the bat). Going with pro windows also is nice, since on multiple machines I do a lot of remote desktop (i.e. all my older computers are networked together giving me a "cheap" distributed local network now for doing longer running jobs).

For the 3770, make sure you get a board that has the esata external ports (not all the 3770 boards come with esata external). Esata on the REDmag is so so much faster then USB, also with lower budget you have a tendency not to have a ton of REDmag ssd so you end up needing to move data to the computer more frequently(this takes forever if using usb 2.0). Also you said you were getting an external drive, esata is the way to go with low budget and high performance. On esata options, all you need is the 3 gig esata, the 6 gig is nice but is a price jump up across the board which most of your stuff for this config won't really use.

[JJ Rok]

Thanks for the response Patrick! I'm definitely just gonna get 1 SSD and a 2TB or two for extra storage. I think I know everything I'm gonna order, just deciding on a mobo. These are the two I'm looking at now, the Maximus V Formula has 1 external eSata port while the P877-V Deluxe has 2, so I'm leaning towards that one. Anyone have experience with them?

Asus P8Z77-V DELUXE LGA1155
Asus MAXIMUS V FORMULA LGA1155

Final list:

- i7 3770k
- one of the above mobos
- INTEL BXRTS2011LC Liquid Cooling
- 32GB 1600Mhz RAM
- Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD - boot drive
- OCZ Vertex 4 512GB SSD or Samsung 830 512GB - editing drive
- WD Black Caviar 2TB - storage drive
- 500GB 7200rpm HD - media cache
- NVIDIA GTX570 2.5GB
- CORSAIR 800W
- COOLER MASTER Storm Sniper SGC-6000-KXN1-GP

[PatrickFaith]

... These are the two I'm looking at now, the Maximus V Formula has 1 external eSata port while the P877-V Deluxe has 2, so I'm leaning towards that one. Anyone have experience with them?

Asus P8Z77-V DELUXE LGA1155
Asus MAXIMUS V FORMULA LGA1155

I have systems that have both boards lines ( i.e. i just received a p9x79 which is for a different cpu type ... same concept as the p8z99). I also have some Maximus boards. I'd lean to the p8z77, as you say, it has 2 esata ports and I guarantee you will using both of them. Also on your split now of ssd and disk, it makes sense to me for your config. btw ... don't go below 800w on the power. This will be a great machine, have fun ;)

[JJ Rok]

Thanks for all of your help! Its great to get such useful feedback from so many people. I ordered my new machine today, so I will post an update once I have it all set up.

FINAL LIST:

- i7 3770k 3.5GHZ
- Asus P8Z77 DELUXE LGA 1155
- INTEL BXRTS2011LC Liquid Cooling
- 32GB 1600Mhz RAM
- Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD - boot drive
- Samsung 830 512GB - editing drive
- WD Black Caviar 2TB - storage drive
- WD Black Caviar 1TB - media cache
- NVIDIA GTX570 2.5GB
- Thermaltake 1000W
- COOLER MASTER Storm Sniper SGC-6000-KXN1-GP

total: $3170 --- a little over my budget, but thats because I decided to get the more expensive Samsung SSD and a cache drive, which I think will be worth it in the long run.