Recommend a workstation builder?

[Marie Mortensen]

I currently edit DSLR and go pro footage on a MacBook and I'm about to start working with Red so it's time for my first workstation! Yeah! I work primarily in Premiere with some after effects, speed grade, photoshop, and illustrator. Most of my projects are commercials for broadcast and web as well as long form documentary. Ideally the setup would be able to be mobile even if that just means getting a pelican for the tower. I've researched components but I'm not comfortable building it myself and my budget for the workstation is only about $5k (not including monitors or accessories). Any recommendations on where I could have my low budget dream machine built? Thanks!

 

[Robert Kurhajetz]

for what it's worth....I have heard good things about these folks;

http://www.pugetsystems.com/

http://www.velocitymicro.com/velocityHPC.php

 

[Marie Mortensen]

Thanks Robert!

 

[Zak Brickett]

I just bought all the components and built one myself. I have no previous experience building computers.

Although a tedious and nit-picky process when you come across an error, it was fun and now i have a pretty beefy computer and more knowledge about how it actually works.

 

[Marie Mortensen]

Zak, what were some of your resources for troubleshooting problems?

 

[Zak Brickett]

Reduser.net haha.

I posted the components I was looking at and people told me changes to make and possible incompatibility issues. Even today, I couldn't get my GTX Titan to work with Mercury Playback Engine and so I posted a question on how to do so and I got a reply in a half hour with a solution.

For the most part installation is easy: Plug everything in, boot from a disk drive with the OS and install it. I built the minimum setup outside of the case to confirm I could get to the BIOS then rebuilt it in the case. The one (STUPID) issue i had was I plugged one of the fans into the wrong pins on the mother board which made the motherboard continuously loop before getting to the Bios screen. But like I said I just went through everything to ensure things were plugged in correctly and quickly noticed that I was a doofus.

 

[Les C.]

http://www.neqx.com/ specializing in SuperMicro. I went with a dual Xeon X9DAi motherboard and have been quite happy.

 

[David Kuhn]

Boxx - http://www.boxxtech.com/

Great builder.

 

[Marie Mortensen]

Thanks for the suggestions! Zak, great to know this such a reliable forum!