Wish List Puter equipment purchases...

[gamer0004]

Fans adjust dynamically based on temperatures, so it's really not necessary to pay $80 for fan controllers. Also, it's probably better to have a GPU at 80 degrees Celcius and quiet than to have the same card at 75 degrees and making a lot of noise (which is probably what you'd get by adjusting the fan speed), because fan speed really doesn't improve cooling that much (above a certain point) though it does make things a lot less comfortable for you.

[bobby 55]

Okay, thanks.
In other news I just backed up my entire C: Drive onto an external HDD, 280 gig.
I've only now found the method to completely remove the back cover of this bloody thing. I'll have one last throw of the (cleaning) dice before summoning help. Unfortunately it appears the warranty has expired.

Added: Well that knocked 10 degrees off, I think it's only temporary though.

[bobby 55]

Well my bro-inlaw took pity on me and is lending me a spare PC of his. It's got an i7 core 920 processor, a 512 megabyte 9800 gt card, 4 gig RAM, on an Asus P6T mobo. It's better than nothing, and it's not overheating,

[gamer0004]

In fact, I would be very happy if I were you. That core i7 920 is still a very very capable CPU. It won't need upgrading for quite a few years (at least not for playing games at decent framerates). If you're allowed to upgrade it I would buy a decent GPU, I dunno how fast that 9800GT card is but it's a bit old. The AMD 7 series will be released shortly which would probably be a good choice, or you can wait for the new Nvidia series.

[bobby 55]

Cheers, I wouldn't think my brother inlaw would mind if I put a better card in. He hinted that he might not want this PC back and he'll take mine to have a look at and try to fix it. He sort of builds computers for other people as a hobby, mostly for close friends and family.

[gamer0004]

So do I Building PCs is fun. Might buy a new computer in a few years just for the sake of it xD
It's also useful, being able to select the components that suits one's needs perfectly and being able to upgrade and fix things.

[AEmer]

yup, same thing. I'm head geek of computer puttogethers, and all my geek friends are minions...even though they're usually computer scientists. It's definitely not something everybody who's into computers enjoy worrying about.

That core I7 920 is an amazing CPU. It's as good as my PhenomII quad 3,5ghz, if not better.

If you're getting a bigger card, of course, it's the same deal as
http://www.offtopicproductions.com/foru ... =7&t=11202
grammatolatry. I need a picture from inside the case, and I need the PSU size.

You'll be fine with the 9800GT for now. It's a fine card, only a little bit old in the tooth...but with the amd 7 series, you might want to upgrade

[Morpheus]

I am currently having a few issues which in future will need to sort out. I am doing video editing from time to time and I have 1TB hard disk that now has less than 500GB of free space and I have backed it up onto another external HD of 1.3TB. Going to need way more space in the future, plus the same amount to back up on but I have a limited budget at present and don't know the cheapest but most reliable method of doing this.

Another problem when I am video editing, I edit and render videos in full 1080p HD and it can take up to 3 hours to render a 15 minute video on my PC depending on the length and how many video clips were used. I use Sony Vegas Movie Studio 11 HD and have used CFF explorer to set Sony Vegas so it can handle more than 2GB RAM. My current specs are:

750W PSU
Samsung SyncMaster P2070 monitor
Intel Quad Core 2.8Ghz
6GB RAM
1GB Geforce 9800GTX Graphics
Creative X-Fi xtrememusic soundcard which I think might have problems
Asus lightscribe BluRay RW drive
DVD Rom drive
320GB internal HD
1TB external Iomega HD 3.5"
1.3TB external Iomega HD 3.5"
100GB external HD 3.5"
300GB external HD 2.5"
160GB external HD 2.5"

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

What would I need to decrease the amount of time a video renders? More graphics power?

[AEmer]

Not necessarily.

I mean, I'm not a video rendering buff by any means, but there are two ways to do it:

Render it on CPU.

Render it on the graphics card.

Now, video rendering is highly parallel, so a cpu with many cores, as you have, should perform much better than one with fewer cores. It should also perform far better on the graphics card than on the CPU.

I don't think you currently use the GPU for rendering; in fact, I'm not sure you're even using all 4 cores of your cpu. The quick test is to hit ctrl-alt-delete, open job list, then click the performance tab.

You should see how much performance your CPU currently runs up, as well as the performance of each core.

Then simply start rendering, and look at what happens. If only one of the graphcs max out, you're only using a single core. If all of them max, and the CPU goes to 100%, you're using all the cores. If none of them max or near-max, you're using the GPU.

Report back with the results, and then maybe I can help more

[gamer0004]

Only a few software packages use the GPU for rendering, not all brands support GPGPU properly and quality is often a lot worse. Good enough for quickly converting a movie to watch on a tablet or laptop on vacation, not good enough for anything else basically. So yeah it's your CPU that's doing the work probably. But your CPU is still quite fast. Are you converting directly to your external HDD? Because USB 2.0 speeds are quite low, not sure whether that's a bottleneck though.

[Morpheus]

Only a few software packages use the GPU for rendering, not all brands support GPGPU properly and quality is often a lot worse. Good enough for quickly converting a movie to watch on a tablet or laptop on vacation, not good enough for anything else basically. So yeah it's your CPU that's doing the work probably. But your CPU is still quite fast. Are you converting directly to your external HDD? Because USB 2.0 speeds are quite low, not sure whether that's a bottleneck though.

I render them to my external HDD from videos on the external drive. Could be down to the processor, since someone I know has one of the core i7 6 core CPUs and can render videos in around 40 minutes, same full HD but longer and more complex than my videos, have to upgrade sometime next year.

[AEmer]

...a 15 minute encoded HD video? how big can that be? I doubt USB would be a problem, fullHD should never exceed ~30 mbps bandwidth demand.

I doubt very much that rendering directly to the external drive would pose a problem, but I recommend you test by rendering to an internal drive, see what changes.

Also, Gamer, how new is that information you have on CPU rendering being supperior? It seems like nvidia cuda based software should be able to encode things really well, to me anyway.

[Hashi]

Puterz.

[gamer0004]

@Aemer: I read some tests done not too long ago. It's still very much in its infancy, unfortunately and remarkably enough.

[bobby 55]

Okay, it's gonna take a few paydays to get a card, and, unfortunately, the $350AU (or thereabout) for a 6950 2gb is unaffordable.

So something like this might have to suffice: http://www.techbuy.com.au/p/166713/VIDE ... 556-KR.asp

The bro-inlaw has put a 650 watt PSU in this rig.