Hello, I am new to rendersoity.. I like the site very much!!

I had a couple questions regarding building a machine for 3D/Video editing.

I was wondering, what are the things to look for? Here is what I have came up .. I am going to be building a Windows based machine. I know Mac's are sometimes better for this, but a PC is what I'm going to work with for now.

Basically what are the essential things I need to look for when trying to piece together a FAST editing machine..

here are the things that i have figured to already be essential in the descion making..
I encourage anyone to add to it...
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Processor - AMD or Intel?
Bit - 32 or 64?
Hyperthreading - Yes or no?
Hard Drive - regular or RAID?
Video Card - whats the best for 3D/Video editing?
RAM - Whats the best type of RAM?
Bus Speeds - ???
Are there any Pre-Built systems that are excellent?
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there are alot of other things I know I am forgetting as well.. Please let me know what to look for..

Thanks in advance! I hope to add some of my own content to renderosity soon!

I'd think any decent computer should be sufficient for video editing these days. Afterall, MovieMaker is bundled with XP isn't it?
If there's anything that's really important, I'd say the HD. The more storage the better. RAID wouldn't hurt either, especially if you plan on spreading out the storage over multiple drives. (I'm no expert, but from what I understand - that's what RAID was made for.) Video, like audio, can go through drivespace pretty fast so I'd stress storage capability as being the most important feature if that's what a computer is being built for.

Quote -
--------------------------------->
Processor - AMD or Intel?
Bit - 32 or 64?
Hyperthreading - Yes or no?
Hard Drive - regular or RAID?
Video Card - whats the best for 3D/Video editing?
RAM - Whats the best type of RAM?
Bus Speeds - ???
Are there any Pre-Built systems that are excellent?
---------------------------------->
there are alot of other things I know I am forgetting as well.. Please let me know what to look for..

Thanks in advance! I hope to add some of my own content to renderosity soon!

Hello and welcome, these are my views on it:-

AMD, dual core or the skt 939 Opterons (won't be hyperthreading)

64 Bit

Raid - has various flavours - Striping - splits data between drives giving better performance, Mirroring - duplicates data so that you have a back up if a drive fails - at the top level you can stripe and mirror - but you need more drives. If you're serious about your editing it's worth going with a striped and mirrored array of 4 drives.

Video Card - I like the Quattro cards by nvidia - but there are plenty out there - I also have an older machien running a Radeon 9700 and it is more then capable of driving two monitors and good editing with my preferred package Adobe premier.

If you're going with current AMD look at high spec DDR, such as corsairs twinx on a motherboard that supports dual channel ram (nForce4 chip set use the biggest pair of sticks you can afford...) bus speed would be quoted as 400M, but is physically 200.

For off the shelf, there are plenty of good companies, I can recomend Scan (www.scan.co.uk), Aria (www.aria.co.uk) and evesham (www.evesham.co.uk) I've bought from all of them and been pleased. Consider Boxx expensive but top notch graphics editing experts - they build awesome machines.

Hi
I think a better way of going about this would be to decide on your budget first then shop around and see what you can pick up "off the shelf" for that price.

I just got a Dell Dimension 9150 with Dual Core Viiv's (3.4GHz) and 4 GB DDR2 RAM (Dual Channel).

RAID is not a requirement but is probably a nice feature if you are worried about your data and losing it (I have 2 x 250GB SATA HD's in a normal setup with multiple partitions).  Depends on your preferences and experience.  I've been working with PC's for 15 years and as yet have not had a HD crash at all.

If anything I would splash out on the Graphics card for video editing and for 3d Modelling the RAM is probably more important. (I have an nVidia 7800 GTX).

Keep in mind though that most of the apps at present won't take advantage of Dual core technology or even much past 2GB of RAM.  The benifit of having these added bits of hardware is more benificial if you're going to be running multiple apps at the same time. (ie you can leave Poser to render a scene while you do something else).

A lot depends on what apps you will be using.Do they support multiple cpu's?Are they coded for 64 bit?And of course the final price tag as well.These answers among others are the  deciding factor in which machine will suit you best.

are you saying that some 3d apps wont even work with a 64bit chip?

Most should work with 64 bit.
Although I'm not sure about compatibility of some of them with WinXP 64 Bit though.  There have been a few people with problems.

It's just that most of them are not optomised to take advantage of a 64 bit processor or even Dual processors.

64 bit comes in handy though if you do a lot of high precision number crunching.

Also, don't skimp on the power supply.  The newer video cards (and I think) dual core processors draw more current than some of the older hardware.  And cooling -- speed usually means more heat.

I've had good luck with all my 3D software running winXP x64.  The only program I couldn't run was gmax, but it would run if I installed winXP Pro (32 bit).

Take a look at the benchmark thread in the carrara forum to get an idea of the different rendering speeds of various computers.

http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2560836

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It's just that most of them are not optomised to take advantage of a 64 bit processor or even Dual processors.

I agree about optimisation for 64-bit, but many 3d packages support dual proc / multi-core proc