Questions about using a gaming PC to edit

[Jarvis Alston]

Hello All,

I've just received my scarlet and am looking to buy a new PC specifically for editing the footage in Adobe CS6. I will also be doing some light grading but not in davinci, just in redcine and adobe.
I would like to be able to get the whole setup, software and all for under $5000 but if I go a little over it won't matter. I'm new to this type of PC and have found some candidates just by googling "gaming PC". Would these be able to edit smoothly and reliably with 4K footage.

Thanks very very much for your advice and if you could please post your specs in your responses so I can see what everyone out there is editing on.

CyberpowerPC Gamer Fang III GLC1802 Desktop PC, Intel Core i7-3820 3.6GHz, 16GB RAM, 2TB Hard Drive, 60GB SSD, Windows 7 Home Premium, Black/Blue

CyberpowerPC Fang III GLC2020 Gaming Desktop PC with Intel Core i7-3930K 3.2GHz Processor, 16GB RAM, 2TB HDD, AMD Radeon HD7970 Graphics Processor

Any advixce on graphics cards etc or what I should really be focusing on, RAM etc, I'm just wanting to know where I should be spending my money. Thanks.

Jarvis

[Alexander Ibrahim]

I recommend rolling your own PC right now. The prebuilts gaming machines lack a few key features. (That will change in the coming months, but not just yet.)

CS6 Cloud seems to be the way to go, and that should run you $50 a month.

In addition I really recommend using Resolve to do a lot of your on set workflow. If you are finishing 1080p Resolve Lite is free.

In fact I recommend getting a Black Magic Cinema camera, because you get a Resolve License and a copy of UltraScope software. The BMD Cinema is a great little B cam for Red when shot in RAW or Log, if you can tolerate the relatively low resolution. (which isn't a restriction at all on a lot of projects.)

OK, back to your question.

I recommend using one of the recently released Thunderbolt motherboards. Thunderbolt is wicked fast and gives you tons of options.

I also recommend Thunderbolt i/o devices. Black magic is the way to go here, with Ultrastudio 3D, but the new Teranex boxes are really damned impressive. A must have if you think you might have to deal with SD archive footage.

Also, any Thunderbolt motherboard is also going to be an Ivy Bridge MB, and that brings its own performance gains throughout the system, especially PCIe 3.0

I also recommend a minimum of 16GB of RAM, 24GB seems to be the sweet spot, but I'd recommend 32GB to give you some room for future needs.

As far as graphics cards go, I really recommend Nvidia's new Kepler GPU series, which the PNY folks tell me should ship late this summer.

You really want two GPU's and you won't use SLI or Crossfire for video. I recommend two Nvidia 680GTX today, but there should be a raft of Kepler based GPUs starting later this summer.

You do not want AMD GPU because they dont support all the features of Premiere or Resolve, which use CUDA.

As far as overall system performance I also recommend using an SSD for boot and applications and one for system cache.