Zanzaben wrote:So I am just starting the fun job of building a new PC from scratch. I am building this primarily to laugh in the face of any thing the video editing software world can throw at me. I use Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium so that is where I will start.
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My budget for all of this is around $4,000, if of course it turns out that to do what I need I only have to spend $2,000 then by all means tell me that setup.
You do not have the budget for laughing in the face of video editing software.
Zanzaben wrote:Long story short I want to be able to have Premiere Pro and After Effects open simultaneously on 2 separate monitors both working with uncompressed 1080p avi files with Dynamic Link running between them.
Uncompressed is a great way to smash your HDD on it when you have plenty of spare CPU time to abuse instead. Might wanna go for some high res monitors at a decent bit-depth if you're working on HD and expect to see it all.
Zanzaben wrote:I know a decent amount about computers in general but I know nothing about the details of video editing and how much it taxes a computer to do this. So I have questions like if adobe and the files need to be stored on an SSD or not, if 16 gb of ram is enough or if I need 32, is the GeForce GTX 670 enough to handle it on its own or should I get 2 GPUs, I have absolutely no idea about audio cards.
SSD won't make a difference if your files are too large for them. Your best bet is to get some slightly smaller SSDs and then RAID0 them if you want serious performance. SATA3 will realistically perform as well as this for most uses though, even on NTFS, as well as cost significantly less and come in larger sizes. Also tune them with a filesystem better suited to large files with fast seeks, but I don't recall XFS working in Windows so lol. 32GB is maybe enough for Premiere OR After Effects, certainly not both if you're doing any heavy 1080p lifting. Not sure about GFX cards as I use Quadros but in general, if you rely on CUDA, you want cards with a lot of VRAM and the widest mobo lanes you can get for throughput; I wouldn't worry too much about the number of cores. Audio won't make any difference but in the event you want good audio, get a USB DAC and run that into a proper amplifier rather than using some expensive internal card which still gets interference from being inside your chassis.
I'm not quite sure where Cannonaire pulled that CPU garbage from but you want the most efficient parallel cores you can get, which at the moment comes from Sandy Bridge E5 series Xeons. EVGA make some nice motherboards for this but they cost around $700 and the CPU is around $2000 for just a single one. Contrary to Cannon's post, there are no Ivy Bridge Xeons yet, and ECC makes absolutely no difference for what you're doing. Also, CS6 doesn't use any GPGPU that I'm aware of, it's almost explicitly CUDA. The more cards you have on separate busses though, the more throughput you get, and the more VRAM you can access concurrently. Shit gets expensive though, and doesn't have all that much benefit in the end.
Just worth pointing out, no Avatar is actually 1080p other than Ghibli films so far, so not sure exactly why you're wanting such high res.