What's the most cost effective way to upgrage my (older) PC for video editing?

March 3, 2009 6:49 AM

I recently purchased a Canon HF10 video camera and find my current desktop system completely overwhelmed even with the uncompressed files on my local drive. Can I save the old girl, or would it be better to buy a new one?

I was sort of anticipating she would have trouble with the highly compressed files, but I can barely get PE7 to even bring one clip into the timeline without the software locking up or crashing. I'm not looking to do any crazy edits, but light stuff (cropping clips down, adding titles, some music, transitions etc) for home movies to output to DVD. I dug around and most of these situations are specific to the rigs, so here is what I'm working off currently:

Intel D915G Chipset ATX Case w/ 350 Watt PS
Intel P4 CPU 641 3.2 GHz/800FSB/2M S775
Serial ATA (SATA) Hard Drive 750GB (7200 RPM) - I have other external storage for archives
3GB DDR400 PC3200 Memory
ATI 256MB Video Card w/DVI PCI Express
Windows XP Home Edition SP2

Reading the other (sort of) related threads here, I'm pretty sure my old chip/motherboard is the chokepoint. Am I right? What's the best, cost effective way to upgrade to make my system usable for my needs? Would a new chip/motherboard combo still work with my RAM and XP?

posted by ender77 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

A 3.2 gHz P4 is not going to be satisfactory for editing AVCHD.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 6:55 AM on March 3, 2009

Yes. A 3.2GHz P4, despite the impressive sound of the high clock frequency, is like using a piece of string with a paperclip on the end of it. Don't try to lift anything heavy.

That isn't to say you should expect crashes. Your dog-slow CPU is dog slow, yes, but being dog slow isn't a "crash your application" sort of crime. If you're seeing crashing, you have some other possibly unrelated problem to deal with above and beyond the nearly comical slowness of your CPU, and that problem may not be solved by swapping hardware.

Having said that, yes, you will at a minimum be buying a new motherboard, new CPU, new memory, and reinstalling the OS.
posted by majick at 7:08 AM on March 3, 2009

I upgraded to a board like this (mine was actually the 775) but it allowed me to use my old stuff (memory and AGP graphics card), I also got away with just doing a repair install of XP which left all my installed programs intact but YMMV.
posted by zeoslap at 7:49 AM on March 3, 2009

Putting the video files on a second hard drive (either internal or external Firewire) may help, since the files are huge, and the computer can use the system drive for virtual memory as needed, as well as keeping the drive from becoming a bottleneck. This is how pro audio and video workstations are put together.
posted by markblasco at 7:58 AM on March 3, 2009

Response by poster: Ok, so you guys confirmed my suspicions that it's like my slow processor combined with keeping the files on the system drive. I'm open to adding a firewire drive given the size of the files I'm likely to accumulate. Could anyone point me to a combo board/CPU group (on tigerdirect or something similar) that might integrate with the rest of my system (and OS) and get me the performance I might need? I appreciate zeoslap's link but it starts to get out my depth a bit and I'm afraid I'll end up with incompatible parts if left to my own devices. I'd like to keep it under $500 (quite a bit under if possible, but I'd like to take advantage of the camera I just anted up for too).
posted by ender77 at 8:31 AM on March 3, 2009

Your hard drive, video card, and OS are fine. You're going to have to buy new RAM to use on a motherboard with a modern processor. It's a good thing RAM is cheap. 4GB of DDR2 should cost around $40. A quad-core AMD processor costs less than $150. An AM2+ motherboard should cost $80 to $120.
posted by PueExMachina at 2:00 PM on March 3, 2009