Help with PC build

Hi guys,

I'm new to high-spec PC building so bear with me.. I currently use Adobe CS5.5 on a Dell Studio XPS with a 2.53GHz CPU and 8GB of RAM. It's done fine for small HD projects but I'd like to start working with 4k and the new Resolve software for grading and depending on how I find it I might use it for editing too instead of Adobe.

I've been looking through other forums and reading the Da Vinci system configuration guide and I think I'm starting to learn a bit about putting together a PC but I could still use a bit of help in terms of compatibility and prices.

The ASUS P9X79 PRO motherboard is suggested at the low-end but it states that it's not really upgrade-friendly, probably because of the shared PCIe bus. So I'm looking at the Gigabyte 797X-Gaming GT for its 2x PCIe at 16x and plenty of SATA and USB3 ports. Is this a good choice? Can anyone recommend me something cheaper that meets my requirements?

I'll probably start with a single GPU for now in which case Blackmagic recommend the GeForce GTX 780 3GB (or the TITAN 6GB but that's outside my budget)

For CPU I just went with i7 4790K it seemed to be the fastest i7, maybe I don't need it, but with the small difference in price I might as well go for it. Thoughts?

For RAM I might manage with 16GB for the time being but again maxing it out to 32GB now will probably save money in the future.

So the rest..
- 1000W power supply
- 500GB SSD
- 2-4TB HDD (I might get more down the line for RAID-0)
- DVD R/RW
- pretty basic sound card
- wifi
- CPU cooler + compatible case

My budget is €1,000-1,500, I might go a little over that if it means I will save in the long run but I'm not looking to build a full 4k workstation right now. I also need to keep some cash aside for a monitor or two.

Any comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

If you plan to upgrade to 4k at a later date, I would suggest spending the majority of your money on the MB/CPU, and then skimp on the GPU for now. At the later date, I recommend dual Titans for full 4k work, I use them, and they work flawless. I use a Asus P9X79-E WS with Intel 4930k CPU.

Asus just came out with the X99-E WS. I go with that, plus the i7 5820K, with EVG 770GTX 4GB.

That's great advice thanks! I was recommended the x99-E and the i7 5820K on another forum too so those are looking like solid choices. So is the 770GTX better than the 780GTX?

Hi. I've been thinking about building a new PC too, but I probably won't do it for another half an year. Right now I have a i7-3820 + SLI 670 based build (since I also like to game) that's a little over 2 years old.

I wouldn't go with an ASUS P9X79 PRO motherboard. Not because it's a bad board, but because the X79 era is coming to it's end. The Haswell-E processors are using the new LGA 2011-v3 socket that's not compatible with the old LGA 2011 socket. Plus the X99 chipset supports considerably more SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 ports. Possible drawback is it also requires you to use DDR4 memory that is expensive and has not matured yet. As for the X99 motherboards, I've only read about Asus boards, but there seem to be quite good boards at around 250$ price range. The cheapest Asus X99 motherboard X99-A also looks like a good board and the extras found on more expensive Asus boards do not justify the price difference for me, although Asus X99-DELUXE motherboard has onboard wifi and bluetooth.

The Z97 Gigabyte board you provided seems to be a good board, but maybe if you are looking to save some money it might be a bit overkill with it's specs. GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-UD5H-BK and GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-UD5H seem to be very similar to the board you suggested, with biggest difference that popped out to me that your board has more (and faster) PCI-E expansion slots. However if you do plan to go SLI or Crossfire one day from what I've read the speed differences between PCI-E x16-x16 and x8-x8 with today's video cards are negligible, at least when looking at the gaming aspect - maybe with content creation it might be somewhat different. The same issue applies to 5820K processor, because it only supports up to 28 PCI-E lanes (compared to 5930K and 5960K that support up to 40 lanes). But for me the 12 extra PCI-E lanes and 100-200 MHz faster base clock speed is definitely not worth the extra 200$ you pay for 5930K. Also the ASUS Z97-PRO(Wi-Fi ac) is worth looking at as it has onboard wifi and bluetooth.

As for the video card it's hard to say if GTX 770 is better choice as the GTX 780 although you could get 4 GB version of GTX 770 for cheaper than you would pay for GTX 780 and at 4K extra vRAM could be beneficial. However if you are not in a rush with your build you could also wait for the Geforce 900 series that should come out this month or in October. Those cards are rumored to be cheaper, somewhat faster/be on par in performance with current gen cards and draw significantly less power. The new AMD cards should also come out in the first half of 2015.

Intel i7 4790K should indeed be the best content creation CPU for LGA 1150 socket, because of it's hyper-threading compared to i5 CPUs and if it costs only a fraction more than other i7 47xx CPUs then I'd go for it. However the 5820K is such a sweet deal at only 50$ more and the extra 2 cores are well worth it. Yes, you have to pay 50-200$ extra for motherboard and 50-200$ extra for 16 GB of memory but you get what you pay for. That is unless you also game a lot in which case you are better off saving that money or investing it into graphics.

16 GB of RAM is ok to start with (especially with high RAM prices), but as you know there are many content creation programs that can chew up all the RAM you throw at them. This probably applies to DaVinci Resolve as well, though I'm using Adobe suite myself.

The rest:
- 1000W power supply - you might not need a 1000W PSU. Use a PSU calculator when you know the exact specs of your build (and possible upgrades you have in mind such as another GPU) and then you might add a little extra to recommended PSU wattage. For example you can use "eXtreme Power Supply Calculator Lite".
- 500 GB SSD - from what I've seen lately the Crucial MX100, Crucial M550 and Samsung EVO have offered best bang for buck.
- RAID-0 - I had 2 1TB Caviar Blacks in RAID 0 until last week when 1 bad sector appeared on one disk and made 1 file crash. Not a big deal but after that I decided to break the RAID. Point being, back up your files, especially when using RAID 0, because if one disk decides to fry you'll lose all your files. I was using the motherboard RAID and the biggest speed difference came from sequential reads and writes (I used CrystalDiskMark to benchmark speeds). RAID 0 seq R/W was about 220 MB/s vs 135 MB/s when those disk are alone.
- pretty basic sound card - all the motherboards I mentioned (except for ASUS P9X79 PRO) are using Realtek ALC1150 audio chipset that's ought to be a pretty decent solution so depending on your audio system or if are planning to record audio with your PC you might not need a sound card.
- CPU cooler - if you don't plan to overclock (much) then you can't go wrong with Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO.

The new Nvidia 900 series has come out this week.

I would build this PC:
Asus X99 Deluxe ~$400 probably
Intel i7 5820K $389
Nvidia 970 $329
DDR4
SSD Samsung EVO
850 - 1000 PSU

That should keep you in the ~$1500 range. You can add a second 970 at a later dater, which should handle 4K easy.

Brent k - How come you suggest the GTX970 over the 980? Would adding the 2nd GTX970 (two total) be more beneficial than the single 980? Two GTX970's are pretty much the same price as one GTX980.

Hi all,

As I am looking for how to get a RAID for my PC.
So, you just put two HDDs in PC and make it to be a RAID 0 ?
I'm now looking for 4~8 bay RAID to do RAID 5, that must need a controller?
It seems cost a lot.

@ZachChang: Many boards have built-in support for some RAID configs, including 0, 1 5, and 10, but a PCIe hardware controller will be much faster. The brand of choice of Areca. The HDDs should be enterprise-type, ie, more expensive. The more drives to each "volume" (array of disks), the faster it runs. You can read all about your choices, what these mean, and how to do it, here:
ppbm7 [dot ]com/index.php/tweakers-page/85-raid-or-not-to-raid/96-raid-or-not-to-raid

While you're add, read the page "Balanced Systems" on the same site, if not all the rest.

Any decent RAID system is indeed expensive, especially if it includes backup, as do they all save RAID 0, and the more so with size. Don't forget to get the BBM and a UPS. Wish 'twere otherwise. Good luck.

Thank you Jerry, the info. do help me a lot.
I did some search Areca, PCIe RAID, some of product looks good. Just don't know if they are as nice to use as they say, but the price sounds fair and it fits thunderbolt. I am getting more detail about it, might going to get one.

Also, it is really interesting to me, PCIe RAID. Since I thought PCIe is a kind of bus designed for internal expansion only, they expand it out. That should slow down the performance, doesn't it?

I think he was recommending using an internal RAID card as they can be a lot faster than Thunderbolt. TB is limited to PCI-e 2 x4 (approx 2GB/s before overheads) as it's basically a PCI-e bridge to external devices, Adaptec RAID cards can go up to PCI-e 3 x8 (approx 7.87GB/s before overheads) and support 12Gb/s drives. Whether the hard drives are then attached internally or in an external box makes no difference as long as the way they are connected supports the full throughput

I'm only just seeing this now, thanks for the advice I was saving money for a while but back looking again. I will definitely take this on board.

Hi. I've been thinking about building a new PC too, but I probably won't do it for another half an year. Right now I have a i7-3820 + SLI 670 based build (since I also like to game) that's a little over 2 years old.

I wouldn't go with an ASUS P9X79 PRO motherboard. Not because it's a bad board, but because the X79 era is coming to it's end. The Haswell-E processors are using the new LGA 2011-v3 socket that's not compatible with the old LGA 2011 socket. Plus the X99 chipset supports considerably more SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 ports. Possible drawback is it also requires you to use DDR4 memory that is expensive and has not matured yet. As for the X99 motherboards, I've only read about Asus boards, but there seem to be quite good boards at around 250$ price range. The cheapest Asus X99 motherboard X99-A also looks like a good board and the extras found on more expensive Asus boards do not justify the price difference for me, although Asus X99-DELUXE motherboard has onboard wifi and bluetooth.

The Z97 Gigabyte board you provided seems to be a good board, but maybe if you are looking to save some money it might be a bit overkill with it's specs. GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-UD5H-BK and GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-UD5H seem to be very similar to the board you suggested, with biggest difference that popped out to me that your board has more (and faster) PCI-E expansion slots. However if you do plan to go SLI or Crossfire one day from what I've read the speed differences between PCI-E x16-x16 and x8-x8 with today's video cards are negligible, at least when looking at the gaming aspect - maybe with content creation it might be somewhat different. The same issue applies to 5820K processor, because it only supports up to 28 PCI-E lanes (compared to 5930K and 5960K that support up to 40 lanes). But for me the 12 extra PCI-E lanes and 100-200 MHz faster base clock speed is definitely not worth the extra 200$ you pay for 5930K. Also the ASUS Z97-PRO(Wi-Fi ac) is worth looking at as it has onboard wifi and bluetooth.

As for the video card it's hard to say if GTX 770 is better choice as the GTX 780 although you could get 4 GB version of GTX 770 for cheaper than you would pay for GTX 780 and at 4K extra vRAM could be beneficial. However if you are not in a rush with your build you could also wait for the Geforce 900 series that should come out this month or in October. Those cards are rumored to be cheaper, somewhat faster/be on par in performance with current gen cards and draw significantly less power. The new AMD cards should also come out in the first half of 2015.

Intel i7 4790K should indeed be the best content creation CPU for LGA 1150 socket, because of it's hyper-threading compared to i5 CPUs and if it costs only a fraction more than other i7 47xx CPUs then I'd go for it. However the 5820K is such a sweet deal at only 50$ more and the extra 2 cores are well worth it. Yes, you have to pay 50-200$ extra for motherboard and 50-200$ extra for 16 GB of memory but you get what you pay for. That is unless you also game a lot in which case you are better off saving that money or investing it into graphics.

16 GB of RAM is ok to start with (especially with high RAM prices), but as you know there are many content creation programs that can chew up all the RAM you throw at them. This probably applies to DaVinci Resolve as well, though I'm using Adobe suite myself.

The rest:
- 1000W power supply - you might not need a 1000W PSU. Use a PSU calculator when you know the exact specs of your build (and possible upgrades you have in mind such as another GPU) and then you might add a little extra to recommended PSU wattage. For example you can use "eXtreme Power Supply Calculator Lite".
- 500 GB SSD - from what I've seen lately the Crucial MX100, Crucial M550 and Samsung EVO have offered best bang for buck.
- RAID-0 - I had 2 1TB Caviar Blacks in RAID 0 until last week when 1 bad sector appeared on one disk and made 1 file crash. Not a big deal but after that I decided to break the RAID. Point being, back up your files, especially when using RAID 0, because if one disk decides to fry you'll lose all your files. I was using the motherboard RAID and the biggest speed difference came from sequential reads and writes (I used CrystalDiskMark to benchmark speeds). RAID 0 seq R/W was about 220 MB/s vs 135 MB/s when those disk are alone.
- pretty basic sound card - all the motherboards I mentioned (except for ASUS P9X79 PRO) are using Realtek ALC1150 audio chipset that's ought to be a pretty decent solution so depending on your audio system or if are planning to record audio with your PC you might not need a sound card.
- CPU cooler - if you don't plan to overclock (much) then you can't go wrong with Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO.

I think he was recommending using an internal RAID card as they can be a lot faster than Thunderbolt. TB is limited to PCI-e 2 x4 (approx 2GB/s before overheads) as it's basically a PCI-e bridge to external devices, Adaptec RAID cards can go up to PCI-e 3 x8 (approx 7.87GB/s before overheads) and support 12Gb/s drives. Whether the hard drives are then attached internally or in an external box makes no difference as long as the way they are connected supports the full throughput

Hello Adam,

This is really cool, so TB-2 only support up to PCIe-2, but now there are some PCIe-3 controller available. Does TB going to follow up PCIe to Gen 3? I believe that would make more people's work easier.

Another, since I am looking for a 4up HDDs RAID, I think internal adapter might not fit my need that well.
Interested in external PCI-e controller box, I found some brands selling related stuff. I picked three 8-bay pcie controller to compare, anyone is their user have anything to share?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Areca ARC-8050E
External PCIe 3.0 to 6Gb/s SAS RAID Storage with friendly price, but don't know how the performance is.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Accusys : ExaSAN - A08S3-PS
PCIe 3.0 32 Gb bandwidth and SAN ready,says 1200MB/s, looks friendly to use too.
But does anyone familiar with this brand?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sonnet Fusion DX800RAID
Same 8-bay but only eight lanes of PCIe 2.0 connectivity

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Zack,
I came across an article in another forum saying he "ran Accusys a08 for four yesrs with no data lost.
Its a solid piece of kit and very affordable and quiet. "
Also, a colorist named Jason Myres had wrote an article on the same model. You can go google it.