hpmoon
Core Ingredients: Motherboard, CPU and GPU
With my system, I had skipped a tick and tock, upgrading the last time to Intel Ivy Bridge with a Core i7-3770K, using that Gigabyte Z77-series motherboard you see above. After Haswell and Broadwell, now Intel’s Skylake architecture uses the Z170 motherboard line, and sticking with Gigabyte (who served me well, and who feature so-called “Ultra-Durable” components), I went with their GA-Z170X-GAMING7 motherboard. That “Gaming” suffix points to a theme: it’s because of gamers, who have little to do with creating cinematic arts, that technology has advanced so rapidly (sort of like lascivious content thrusting forward, ahem, home videotape technology last century). Even if you hate video games (like me), you’ll often be overlapping with that industry when you get good tech. The best example of that is “video cards,” or GPUs, that were designed mainly for 3D object rendering in virtual animations. Ironically, even though you won’t use that as a realist filmmaker, the computing power of GPUs is essential to keeping your video editing work moving along quickly. (This belongs in another article, but basically when you’re using software that leverages GPU power, like Adobe Premiere’s Mercury Playback Engine, things like color correction and even transitions get off-loaded from CPU number-crunching onto the GPU, to spread out resources and speed things up.)
Just like the battle between AMD and Intel, there are GPU wars between AMD (again) and Nvidia: simply put, the latter wins. Adobe (for example) deploys Nvidia’s CUDA acceleration to a much more impactful extent than AMD’s use of OpenGL. The current state-of-the-art by Nvidia is their GeForce 900-series, and a reasonable compromise is to buy any manufacturer’s use of their GTX 960 chipset. Available in 2GB or 4GB of VRAM, 2GB is generally enough, but if you’re pushing the limits, 4GB may be worth it. There are GTX 970s, 980s and Titans too, but those performance gains diminish rapidly the higher you go. There’s only so much of that power (designed really for gaming vectors) that you can use as a video editor.
One last core ingredient to building your system is DRAM, which is the kind of memory that disappears when you turn the computer off (compared to a storage drive). Intel Skylake now requires a new type of DRAM, rated DDR4. Inherently fast to begin with, it’s not critical to get the best DDR4 you can; and my choice shown here is somewhere in the middle but totally sufficient (i.e., it never gets saturated).
Core Ingredients: Motherboard, CPU and GPU
With my system, I had skipped a tick and tock, upgrading the last time to Intel Ivy Bridge with a Core i7-3770K, using that Gigabyte Z77-series motherboard you see above. After Haswell and Broadwell, now Intel’s Skylake architecture uses the Z170 motherboard line, and sticking with Gigabyte (who served me well, and who feature so-called “Ultra-Durable” components), I went with their GA-Z170X-GAMING7 motherboard. That “Gaming” suffix points to a theme: it’s because of gamers, who have little to do with creating cinematic arts, that technology has advanced so rapidly (sort of like lascivious content thrusting forward, ahem, home videotape technology last century). Even if you hate video games (like me), you’ll often be overlapping with that industry when you get good tech. The best example of that is “video cards,” or GPUs, that were designed mainly for 3D object rendering in virtual animations. Ironically, even though you won’t use that as a realist filmmaker, the computing power of GPUs is essential to keeping your video editing work moving along quickly. (This belongs in another article, but basically when you’re using software that leverages GPU power, like Adobe Premiere’s Mercury Playback Engine, things like color correction and even transitions get off-loaded from CPU number-crunching onto the GPU, to spread out resources and speed things up.)
Just like the battle between AMD and Intel, there are GPU wars between AMD (again) and Nvidia: simply put, the latter wins. Adobe (for example) deploys Nvidia’s CUDA acceleration to a much more impactful extent than AMD’s use of OpenGL. The current state-of-the-art by Nvidia is their GeForce 900-series, and a reasonable compromise is to buy any manufacturer’s use of their GTX 960 chipset. Available in 2GB or 4GB of VRAM, 2GB is generally enough, but if you’re pushing the limits, 4GB may be worth it. There are GTX 970s, 980s and Titans too, but those performance gains diminish rapidly the higher you go. There’s only so much of that power (designed really for gaming vectors) that you can use as a video editor.
One last core ingredient to building your system is DRAM, which is the kind of memory that disappears when you turn the computer off (compared to a storage drive). Intel Skylake now requires a new type of DRAM, rated DDR4. Inherently fast to begin with, it’s not critical to get the best DDR4 you can; and my choice shown here is somewhere in the middle but totally sufficient (i.e., it never gets saturated).