Advice on the parts for a home-used production system

Got a shopping cart of parts that you want opinions on? Get advice from members on your planned or existing system (or upgrade).

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designsilent
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Dec 03, 2013 8:34 am

Advice on the parts for a home-used production system

Post by designsilent » Tue Dec 03, 2013 10:26 pm

Greetings

I greatly appreciate your advice and feedback on my system.

The system will be used to: record video-tutorials/podcasts, editing videos/photos, rendering HD videos(1920,1280,720p), web programming as well as personal use and an occasional gaming. (ie Camtasia, Photoshop, Lightroom, DreamWeaver, Sony Vegas, Adobe Premier, Audacity)
Hence it needs to be powerful and quite, Specially it needs to be as quite as possible during screen recording.

My plan(Considering local availability and the price):
CPU: i7 4770K Quad Core 3.5GHZ Haswell 8MB 
Graphic: GeForce GTX 770 2GB (Not sure about the brand, Maybe ASUS, suggest a quite one please)
Motherboard: ASRock Z87 Extreme4
HD: Sandisk ultra plus 128Gb SSD
CASE: Fractal Design Define R4
RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB SDRAM DDR3 1866

CPU COOLER: Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H100i or Noctua’s NH-D14
Tom's Hardware suggests NH-D14 is more quite than H100i, but acknowledges the issue of being bulky is a risk. Also H100i has some build-in software controller for adjusting fans! Please advice what do you suggest.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nep ... ,3607.html

PSU:
1)Antec EA-650 EarthWatts Platinum 650W 80Plus Platinum (sale $70) or
2)Antec EarthWatts Platinum 550 W($93 - Tom's Hardware Recommended) or
3)Rosewill SilentNight-500 500W 80 PLUS PLATINUM Fanless ($140 - SPCR Recommended)
3)Seasonic Platinum Fanless 520W PSU ($160 - SPCR Recommended)
Question is should I go fanless or should I stick with the other options?

I have read the articles on the site about the editor's recommended case, CPU, fan, etc. However, I was unable to pick all my selections out of those lists. I have used following reviews to select some of my parts:
Fanhttp://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lia ... 78-17.html
Case: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lia ... 78-17.html
Motherboard: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/z87 ... ,3582.html


Thank you for your time

CA_Steve
Moderator
Posts: 7650
Joined: Thu Oct 06, 2005 4:36 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Re: Advice on the parts for a home-used production system

Post by CA_Steve » Wed Dec 04, 2013 6:52 am

Welcome to SPCR.

CPU: good

GPU: the GTX 770 is overkill for your work apps. Take a look at Puget Systems benchmarks for Photoshop and Premiere. For gaming, I'd need to know your monitor resolution. In general, the GTX 760 is great for 1080p. The 770 is needed for 1440p. Asus and MSI make nice quiet cards. For the GTX 760, I prefer the MSI Gaming.

Mobo: nice mobo with good power efficiency and bios-level fan control. Useful for audio/video recording as you probably want to delete s/w app bloat, etc to reduce DPC latency. I've been staring at it for my Haswell build.

SSD: It's a middle of the road drive. If you are budget constrained, I'd throw less at the gfx card and put more $'s here. Some SSDs can be limited on write speed at 120GB due to less parallelism (less chips -> less write channels). Might want to go for 250GB. Might consider multiple SSDs - one for OS/apps, one for scratch disk/data files.

Case: good

RAM: big honking heatspreaders add no value and just get in the way of many cpu coolers. DDR3 1866 is marginally faster than DDR3 1600 in Haswell systems. Unless you plan to overclock, you won't notice the difference.

CPU cooler: Unless you plan to overvolt (as part of overclocking), there's no added value to liquid cooling. Go with the NH-D14 if you like. Take a look at the Mugen 4 review here. The Noctua NH-U14S is also nice.

PSU: Size depends on the GPU picked and whether or not you plan to overvolt the CPU. At stock, your system as specified's stress load power is <360W. This drops to 300W with the GTX 760. So, you could go with a fanless PSU in the R4 case. You could also go with a semi-passive design with a fan that won't turn on while recording.

The earthwatts platinum is inexpensive, but it's not great on specs other than efficiency.

designsilent
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Dec 03, 2013 8:34 am

Re: Advice on the parts for a home-used production system

Post by designsilent » Sun Dec 29, 2013 12:11 am

Hi CA_Steve and others!
Thank you for your detailed feedback on my system, based on the feedback and what was on sell during the boxing day I have got the following:

i7 4770K 3.5GHZ
ASRock Z87 Extreme4
Sandisk extreme II 120gb
Fractal Design Define R4
Seasonic Platinum Fanless 520W PSU
Corsair Vengeance Low Profile 8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL10 DIMM (CML8GX3M1A1600C10)
Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H100i
No Graphic card (Most likely Asus GeForce GTX 770)

Currently, I do not plan to over clock, but in the future that the system gets older I may do so!

1)Considering my cpu is not supporting higher than 1600MHZ (unless over-clocked) should I get a $85 "G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB DDR3 1866MHz CL10 DIMM (F3-14900CL10S-8GBXL)" instead of my current $70 Corsair Vengeance which is 1600MHZ?
I have read many reviews on pro-cons of higher speed RAMs but, do you think the extra $15 worth it, in case I OC? Which RAM is a better?
(FYI: I will add similar RAM(s) in future, ie next year or latter that $70~80 gets me 2X8GB)

2)I really won't need the power of a dedicated graphic card until around end of summer of 2014. The ASUS GeForce GTX 770 is on sell for $320 (from $370), should I go for the bargain or by then it's price might be down (or $320 might get me a higher model)?


Thank you and happy new year

CA_Steve
Moderator
Posts: 7650
Joined: Thu Oct 06, 2005 4:36 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Re: Advice on the parts for a home-used production system

Post by CA_Steve » Mon Dec 30, 2013 7:27 am

RAM: <shrugs> There's a slight performance bump for 1866 over 1600. You may or may not see it with your apps. I would have gone with CL9 1600 though. Here's an article for your fun and amusement.

GPU: 6 months is a lifetime. The next generation card should be out then. I'd wait.

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