Help me build my dream video editing & storage machine

Hi hopefully this is the proper part of the forum to post this into

First I have to confess that I build my last pc over 6 years ago and I since then did not read up or follow any computer magazines or test. You could easy say that Im a noob. BUT I have a once in a lifetime opportunity to build a video encoding/ storage server machine and my work will cover the costs.

From the little reading I did I think that the PC-D8000 case from Lian Li would be perfect for my needs... http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product...s_index=62&g=f


The machine needs as much cpu power as possible for video encoding and the plan is to have a 20-25 hdd raid. I know that Id like a water cooled system with a Intel i7 extreme. But i really dont know wich components would be the best for my needs and wich components fit well together.... I need the raid and the cpu encoding power for work but if those criteria are filled and if the case allows It I'd pitch in for a sli system myself and just use the system for work & play.


Open to any suggestions

Bump

Where are you located?

what kind of video work are you doing that you need 20+ drives, and where are you located so we can get a parts list?

i would however start with not getting that case or a bunch of internal drives, what you will want to do is get a NAS that supports ISCSI and a 10gb or dual 1gb network card to use with it. a nas will be cheaper than multiple raid card and offer better performance and utility for the price, it will also let you put it away from the tower as that many HDDs is rather noisy. i would also not touch an i7 if you are doing that, you need a xeon for ECC and you may not even want intel depending on what program u are going to use as if it is CPU only amd may better for the price. since you want a work and play i would guess that you want a single 8 core xeon and a gforce titan and use adobe premier for the video encoding/rendering.

Nice little case, but good to know that there is an upgrade for the V2120

I could do with a little more room, but why are they not making it with 4in1 SSD craddles?

You are not going to want a 20x HHD drive setup you will want a 20+ SSD setup, across multiple RAID controllers, 2ndly you will need a dual processor system which can take more ram. Don't know about Graphics cards, but I am sure that others can chip in.
Good luck with your project!

Henrik

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Originally Posted by Krups

Hi hopefully this is the proper part of the forum to post this into

First I have to confess that I build my last pc over 6 years ago and I since then did not read up or follow any computer magazines or test. You could easy say that Im a noob. BUT I have a once in a lifetime opportunity to build a video encoding/ storage server machine and my work will cover the costs.

From the little reading I did I think that the PC-D8000 case from Lian Li would be perfect for my needs... http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product...s_index=62&g=f


The machine needs as much cpu power as possible for video encoding and the plan is to have a 20-25 hdd raid. I know that Id like a water cooled system with a Intel i7 extreme. But i really dont know wich components would be the best for my needs and wich components fit well together.... I need the raid and the cpu encoding power for work but if those criteria are filled and if the case allows It I'd pitch in for a sli system myself and just use the system for work & play.


Open to any suggestions

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Thanks for all the replys guys...Its been a few days since i was last here !

To answer your questions:

@Movieman: Im from Europe, Germany

@Zanzabar I work with Sony Blu-code most of the time for work. In my free time i do quite a bit of video encoding with x264. I dont need a 20+ hdd hardware raid but i always wanted my own massive storage server...and since work is paying for it why not. For work i need only 3-4 tb of space the rest is for play. I will pitch quite a bit of money myself into this system.

if you only need 3-4TB, i would think you could have more fun with a few of the intel 910 800GB, it is a pci-e SSD with 2GB/s IO (real base 2 gigabytes.)
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/...=intel+910+ssd

You also need to find out if the video encoding you are doing will support either OpenCL or CUDA based GPU acceleration. If so then huge CPU power and RAM is not what you need, but rather one or two high end GPU's instead. If the encoding method will not take advantage of GPU's, then yes an i7 extreme will probably be the best way to go.

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Originally Posted by EniGmA1987

You also need to find out if the video encoding you are doing will support either OpenCL or CUDA based GPU acceleration. If so then huge CPU power and RAM is not what you need, but rather one or two high end GPU's instead. If the encoding method will not take advantage of GPU's, then yes an i7 extreme will probably be the best way to go.

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Cuda is only used for Video decoding and every nvidia card with cuda cupport can do that just fine... ( thats not where the monster power is needed)... In my experiance the bottleneck for encoding machines is always the CPU. I will pitch in for a titan or maybe two out of my own pocket for this system tho...since as mentioned before I'll have it at home and use it for work & play.

@Zanzabar- Those Intel 910 ssd-s look really awsome indeed. Will definetly look into it... We have been using totaly "normal" consumer grade ssd-s at work and the software runs really smoothly on those so I need to check if thse 910-s wont be too much of an overkill


Thanks again for all the nice suggestions and replys

avid is the standard but I also love sony vegas for its simplicity for youtube vids. I never got into premier.
I have been on x58 sabertooth w/ xeon 3540 @ 4ghz, 16gb of gskill at 7-7-7-26- 1t
4 crucial m4 64gb raid 0 on lsi 9260 and 2 2tb samsung F3 in raid0 for storage. let us know when you get it built. I cant wait to see your results.
:)

Looking forward to it aswell... Looking at it more closely and reading zanzabar's advice I decidet to get a smaller case and make this a top performance pc for work and play as for the storage server part I will probably really get a NAS and place it somewhere where it can be loud without me worrying about it too much...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by EniGmA1987

You also need to find out if the video encoding you are doing will support either OpenCL or CUDA based GPU acceleration. If so then huge CPU power and RAM is not what you need, but rather one or two high end GPU's instead. If the encoding method will not take advantage of GPU's, then yes an i7 extreme will probably be the best way to go.

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If it is CPU intensive, then I would go dual Xeon E5-2643 or better since it has ECC support, and supports far more RAM. Also you'll have 16 now (32 later if you wanted to upgrade) vs 12 cores.

http://www.corsair.com/900d . I just transferred my dually system to the corsair 800d, which is awesome, but didn't know about the 900 coming out, would have got the 900.. Go dually Xeon as suggested if your software will use all the cores/threads and can use more than 32GB of memory. MM can give you the scoop on which ones are best to use.

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Originally Posted by Krups

Cuda is only used for Video decoding and every nvidia card with cuda cupport can do that just fine...

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um, no its not? GPU acceleration of encoding has become pretty popular as of late. If the software you use supports it properly then you can get some great speed out of it, about twice as fast as doing encoding on the CPU
https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk