Would someone give me a Mac Pro, please? Thanks.
April 24, 2013 4:48 PM Subscribe
Would the addition of a decent graphics card turn my workaday PC into a competent NLE workstation?
I've managed to get by with running Adobe Premiere CS6 on my 2009 Mac Mini. It's useable but involves a lot of waiting. (Not so bad when cutting ProRes but rendering takes an age.)
Now, I may be able to secure a small amount of editing work. That is, not so much work that I could justify the purchase of a new computer.
I have two options. Work slowly with a workflow optimised for my Mac or upgrade my PC.
This is my PC (I'm running Windows 7 64-bit).
I'm not looking for the power of a souped up Mac Pro. I just want a machine that won't fall over during the most basic of picture edits, will encode to ProRes pretty fast or handle AVCHD well, let me grade footage at more than a snail's pace, and won't complain when applying the simplest of SFX.
This upgrade would be done on a tight budget. I'll likely be adding more memory and another single SATA HDD.
I understand the Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine makes use of CUDA graphics cards. I would like to know if there would be any significant improvement if I installed a low priced card (not more than £200) in my ageing PC. Would it be false economy? Should I just spend £200 on a new machine?
I've managed to get by with running Adobe Premiere CS6 on my 2009 Mac Mini. It's useable but involves a lot of waiting. (Not so bad when cutting ProRes but rendering takes an age.)
Now, I may be able to secure a small amount of editing work. That is, not so much work that I could justify the purchase of a new computer.
I have two options. Work slowly with a workflow optimised for my Mac or upgrade my PC.
This is my PC (I'm running Windows 7 64-bit).
I'm not looking for the power of a souped up Mac Pro. I just want a machine that won't fall over during the most basic of picture edits, will encode to ProRes pretty fast or handle AVCHD well, let me grade footage at more than a snail's pace, and won't complain when applying the simplest of SFX.
This upgrade would be done on a tight budget. I'll likely be adding more memory and another single SATA HDD.
I understand the Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine makes use of CUDA graphics cards. I would like to know if there would be any significant improvement if I installed a low priced card (not more than £200) in my ageing PC. Would it be false economy? Should I just spend £200 on a new machine?
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2. Buy this
3. Add a cheap GPU from this list, like say... this(ctrl+F, it's not in with the other 600 series cards for some asinine reason)
4. leftover money? this sucker. Make that your boot+software install drive for premiere and anything else you use.
Total cost should be £489. Sell your current systems on ebay. People love mac minis, and you will get instant money for that a quick USD to pounds conversion showed the price here for one like that would be around £260, but it might actually be more since macs cost more in the UK in the first place. you'll probably a bit more than £80 for the tower as well, but once again that's just a conversion of US market rate for a similar system.(and i know people who work at a place that dumps surplus towers of about that specification in large quantities). You already said you were willing to spend £200 on a possible upgrade, and this is way better than trying to upgrade the current system you have. I'd also spend any leftover cash on a nicer power supply, and DEFINITELY do not get a faster graphics card than that, the included power supply will not be able to handle it. 300 watts with that setup will be getting close to capacity.
as a side note, i had to some actual internet research as to what the UK equivalent of newegg was so i could recommend the right parts at the right prices, interesting project.
posted by emptythought at 6:06 PM on April 24, 2013