Decent cheap PC for video editing?

[durok]

Using a good SSD as your OS drive makes all the difference in the world...

I've been building my own PCs for ages, and when SSDs first came out, I shot my wad on a first-gen Corsair - great old system still running over at my brother's house as their main PC.

He gets my old builds - my current PC has a Samsung Enterprise-class 1TB SSD that has a 10yr warranty - along with 32GB of Corsair Vengeance memory, and a liquid-cooled and overclocked Devil's Canyon Intel i7 on a MSI Z97 mobo with a MSI GTX 970.

It's definitely not new, but certainly more than gets the job done - even so!

 

[tuanies]

I don't know. It's been 7-8 years (maybe more?) since I bought it. It's an Asus laptop with what I believe is a 1st or 2nd gen i5, hybrid SSD/platter hard drive and maybe 8Gb of RAM?


Thanks to a bunch of coupon apps that my wife installed, it's also had AIDS for a few years, which slows the crap out of it.

You can try reformatting it with a fresh install first and get a little more life out of it, then save up for something better altogether .

 

[Rekreant]

Windows 10 uses 5gb of ram...that pc will run terribly slow. Also ram is very expensive these days, your it guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

 

[tuanies]

Windows 10 uses 5gb of ram...that pc will run terribly slow. Also ram is very expensive these days, your it guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

$130 for 2x8GB doesn't seem too bad.

Windows 10 will use all RAM that is available for caching and to speed things up. It'll be fine with 4GB. Maybe you don't know what you're talking about.

 

[Rekreant]

$130 for 2x8GB doesn't seem too bad.

Windows 10 will use all RAM that is available for caching and to speed things up. It'll be fine with 4GB. Maybe you don't know what you're talking about.

I remember when you could get 16GB of ram for around 75$.

 

[Rekreant]

$130 for 2x8GB doesn't seem too bad.

Windows 10 will use all RAM that is available for caching and to speed things up. It'll be fine with 4GB. Maybe you don't know what you're talking about.

So you somehow thing using a page file is going to perform anywhere close to as good as ram? Come on bro, thats just foolish. I do know what Im talking about.

 

[tuanies]

I remember when you could get 16GB of ram for around 75$.

So you somehow thing using a page file is going to perform anywhere close to as good as ram? Come on bro, thats just foolish. I do know what Im talking about.

Those days are long gone and it was around the DDR2/DDR3 era.

I'm not saying it would hit the page file. Windows 10 is quite good at managing background memory usage and would prioritize as necessary. 4GB isn't ideal but still manageable unless you're piecing together super elaborate videos using Premiere and After Effects.

You're foolish to think that an OS designed for 1GB/2GB (32/64-bit) of RAM minimum would not be able to function with 4GB and require at least 5GB. And I'm speaking from experience of testing and marketing a lot of products of varying performance capabilities half my life.

 

[Rekreant]

Those days are long gone and it was around the DDR2/DDR3 era.

I'm not saying it would hit the page file. Windows 10 is quite good at managing background memory usage and would prioritize as necessary. 4GB isn't ideal but still manageable unless you're piecing together super elaborate videos using Premiere and After Effects.

You're foolish to think that an OS designed for 1GB/2GB (32/64-bit) of RAM minimum would not be able to function with 4GB and require at least 5GB. And I'm speaking from experience of testing and marketing a lot of products of varying performance capabilities half my life.

Ok. Just keep an eye on these forums for when he comes back bitching about how terrible the machine runs with only 4gb of ram. Cell phones have more ram than 4 these days lol. Real life performance will be shit.

 

[Jim85IROC]

I'm willing to bet that it runs better than my 8 year old dinosaur.

 

[tuanies]

Yet an iPhone runs fine with 1GB of RAM. It's all about memory management. Phones with 4GB don't mean much, I launched the first phone with 4GB of RAM too. When gaming isn't taken into consideration, you can get by just fine with less.

Ok. Just keep an eye on these forums for when he comes back bitching about how terrible the machine runs with only 4gb of ram. Cell phones have more ram than 4 these days lol. Real life performance will be shit.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

 

[Rekreant]

I'm willing to bet that it runs better than my 8 year old dinosaur.

You may be surprised. But in the end, do whatever is financially feasible. Much like buying a 20$ servo 5 times before you get to a high quality 100$ one, the same exact situations translate to computers and their parts. Good luck either way.

 

[Rekreant]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnuNs_Nu46Q

Have a watch of this. If you wont believe me, believe the channel with millions of views.

 

[tuanies]

It's his job to tout the latest and greatest and hype things. He's also catering to an enthusiast audience which wants the best of the best.

It's like every car enthusiast saying you're not driving unless you have 400hp+, a manual transmission and RWD. Sure that's really nice but it's far disconnected from reality when most people are perfectly happy driving their Camry 4-cylindr automatic and not needing more

There is a difference between want and need. Not everyone needs a 12-core computer with 32GB of RAM and a Titan V. Is it nice? Sure. But it's not like a computer is unusable if it has 4GB of RAM.

The majority of computer users don't care and it doesn't seem like the original poster does either. He wants to do sinple video editing and the system he posted will get him by. You don't tell someone they need a V8 when all they can afford is an economical 4-cylinder. It'll still work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnuNs_Nu46Q

Have a watch of this. If you wont believe me, believe the channel with millions of views.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

 

[Rekreant]

It's his job to tout the latest and greatest and hype things. He's also catering to an enthusiast audience which wants the best of the best.

It's like every car enthusiast saying you're not driving unless you have 400hp+, a manual transmission and RWD. Sure that's really nice but it's far disconnected from reality when most people are perfectly happy driving their Camry 4-cylindr automatic and not needing more

There is a difference between want and need. Not everyone needs a 12-core computer with 32GB of RAM and a Titan V. Is it nice? Sure. But it's not like a computer is unusable if it has 4GB of RAM.

The majority of computer users don't care and it doesn't seem like the original poster does either. He wants to do sinple video editing and the system he posted will get him by. You don't tell someone they need a V8 when all they can afford is an economical 4-cylinder. It'll still work.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

Anything you can come up with to deny that youre wrong eh?

 

[tuanies]

How am I wrong? Windows 10 will run fine with 4GB of RAM. You have not proven anything that says otherwise Not everyone games or has 50 tabs open in Chrome at once.

I mean here's a story from Windows Central, which gets a lot more page views a month than the amount of subscribers Linus has.

https://m.windowscentral.com/how-much-ram-does-your-windows-10-pc-really-need

If you use your Windows 10 computer for word processing, checking emails, browsing the internet, and playing Solitaire, you should have no problem using 4GB of RAM. If you are performing all of these activities at once, however, you might experience a dip in performance.

This really depends on your workload. If you're editing a lot of HD video, go for 16GB or more. If you're working with photos and a bit of video thrown in, 8GB should get you through.

4GB isn't ideal, but he should be able to get by until he can afford to upgrade. His IT buddies opinion is still valid - spend more on the 6-core processor and live with 4GB of RAM because it'll be better in the long run. RAM is a 5 minute upgrade and cheap.

People have budgets to work with and it's ok to start out with 4GB of RAM on a desktop if that's all he can afford. Now if it was a laptop or something with soldered on RAM, that's a different story.

You should learn to recommend things on what people ask for, not just "get best of everything" mentality. But I don't fault you, I used to think that way and always had the best of the best hardware, but now I don't care and just tell people to buy refurbished Dells to save myself the headaches and troubleshooting.

Anything you can come up with to deny that youre wrong eh?

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

 

[JatoTheRipper]

I'll reiterate what I said. You can never have too much RAM.

Right now I have Google Chrome, two instances of My Computer, Discord, Snipping Tool with a fairly small screenshot and task manager open and I'm using 7.7 of 15.9 GB of RAM. I opened SolidWorks 2017 and a small assembly and that bumped me up to 8 gigs. That's an insignificant jump which I didn't expect since SolidWorks is a resource sucking pig.

You can get by with 8GB. I'd strongly urge you to not settle on 4GB and I'd also urge you to get 16GB if you can afford it.

 

[Rekreant]

You should learn to recommend things on what people ask for, not just "get best of everything" mentality. But I don't fault you, I used to think that way and always had the best of the best hardware, but now I don't care and just tell people to buy refurbished Dells to save myself the headaches and troubleshooting.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

If I was doing that I would have told him to go for the 8700k or even an X series processor with at LEAST 32GB of ram and a 1080ti. If you go back and read my recommendations I came up with solutions that were what most would consider the low to mid end of video editing equipment. The headaches and troubleshooting will come from having a machine that doesnt do what you want it to do in the amount of time you want it to. He runs a youtube channel, so it would not be a stretch to think he has video editing, sound editing, tabs open for research / info, and maybe a video in the background purely for entertainment. 4GB will SURELY function I dont debate that; but the quality of life of using that will be very low.

 

[tuanies]

And all of those things cost more than the $600 he wants to spend. Recommending a 1080 Ti shows exactly why you have no idea what you're recommending. There are diminishing returns for video cards when it comes to video editing and the sweet spot is mainstream stuff like a 1050 Ti / 1060 price points. And a Ryzen would've been a better bang for buck when it comes to export and encoding.

If I was doing that I would have told him to go for the 8700k or even an X series processor with at LEAST 32GB of ram and a 1080ti. If you go back and read my recommendations I came up with solutions that were what most would consider the low to mid end of video editing equipment. The headaches and troubleshooting will come from having a machine that doesnt do what you want it to do in the amount of time you want it to. He runs a youtube channel, so it would not be a stretch to think he has video editing, sound editing, tabs open for research / info, and maybe a video in the background purely for entertainment. 4GB will SURELY function I dont debate that; but the quality of life of using that will be very low.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

 

[durok]

I have a HP Stream 7 tablet that I bought new long ago direct from Microsoft with Windows 8.1 installed on it - NOT a cut-down tablet OS, the full version.

When Windows 10 came out as a free upgrade, I installed it on that tablet...

It's only 7" diagonal, I have a Bluetooth slimline keyboard in a the soft wallet tablet case that has a stand for it.

It has a whopping 1GB of RAM and an Intel Atom 1.33GHz processor.

Again, currently running the fully-updated Windows 10 OS... just fine.

I obviously won't be editing video on it!

I bought it mainly to take out in the field and connect my Castle Link to it, and because it was only $75.


(sure, I stuffed 32GB of gaming-quality RAM in my desktop build, but that's for gaming!)

 

[tuanies]

You can never have too much RAM, but it's ok to start with 4GB and add more later on. It's a desktop and easier to skimp on RAM to beef up the CPU than with a laptop with soldered RAM. Windows also says I have 40% RAM usage with 32GB of RAM with Chrome, Discord and Outlook open. It will always allocate unused memory to background tasks, but doesn't mean you need more RAM when task manager shows high memory usage.

I'll reiterate what I said. You can never have too much RAM.

Right now I have Google Chrome, two instances of My Computer, Discord, Snipping Tool with a fairly small screenshot and task manager open and I'm using 7.7 of 15.9 GB of RAM. I opened SolidWorks 2017 and a small assembly and that bumped me up to 8 gigs. That's an insignificant jump which I didn't expect since SolidWorks is a resource sucking pig.

You can get by with 8GB. I'd strongly urge you to not settle on 4GB and I'd also urge you to get 16GB if you can afford it.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk