I need a windows desktop for use at home and I decided to make a project out of it. For the first time in my life, I'm trying to build my own DIY desktop from individual components.

It will be used primarily for the following tasks
- 1080p video editing (Avid MC5, Premiere Pro CS5) with dual monitors
- BD authoring (NetBlender, Encore CS5)
- working with extremely large outdoor advertising image files in Creative Suite apps
- occasional gaming (but I want it to be able to run demanding upcoming 2011 games)
- possible future upgrade for 3D BD authoring

I've been doing a bit more research and I'm leaning towards buying the following components from Newegg.

The Asus Rampage III Extreme mobo provides the following integrated ports:
- 4 x PCI-e 2.0 x16 slots (supports x16/x16, x16/x8/x8, x8/x8/x8/x8)
- 2 x SATA 6GB/s
- 2 x USB 3.0
- 1 x eSATA 3GB/s
- 1 x Optical S/PDIF out
- 7 x USB 2.0
- 1 x Firewire 1394a

I plan to install the following PCI-e cards

(1) OCZ PCI-e SSD card in x16

and then I have two options for the video card
---->Either 1 x GTX 580 card in x16
---->or 2 x GTX 580 card in x8
which is better? it seems like this high performance card would be bottlenecked by the x8 slot,
is there a different mobo that will not gimp the 2nd and 3rd x16 slots?

Here is what my shopping cart is looking like:


now I have absolutely no idea about the following:

- which case would be best (quiet, understated, no colored lights, noise reduction panels, large enough for dual graphics cards and can fit all the components and these ports
- 2 x SATA 6GB/s
- 2 x USB 3.0
- 1 x eSATA 3GB/s
- 1 x Optical S/PDIF out
- 7 x USB 2.0
- 1 x Firewire 1394a
- Dual GTX 580 video ports (2 x HDMI, 2 x DisplayPort, 4 x DVI)

- which power supply is ideal (I think I need a 1500w power supply)

- do I need to buy some sort of SLI bridge to link the video cards, or does the fact that this mobo is "SLI ready" mean that I don't need any additional bridge component?

- fans with quiet mode? best cooling solution? water? do I need to apply thermal paste myself? any good tutorials for this? (the OCZ SSD max operating temperature is 70 degrees C. Will it be difficult to keep sufficiently cool?)

- I want to add a Raid0 configuration of 4 x 2TB WD Caviar Black 7200 RPM drives. Is it better to do this internal and add internal Raid controller, or is there some external Raid solution that be better?

- is there anything else I'm missing from my shopping cart?

A 1500W PSU from a quality brand is a bit overkill, even a 1200WPSU is somewhat overkill, but this should work for that. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139014 (Though everything else in this build is a bit overkill)
As to the case, a Corsair Obsidian D is a nice looking case. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139001 Though it does have a window. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139002.
SLI will need a SLI bridge but the cards should come with them (atleast AMD cards do)
And your SSD should be easily kept below 70C. Water cooling is not recommended.

You're spending $1000 on just a CPU? You either have a ton of money to throw away or you are spending entirely to much money on a PC.

You could buy a PC for $1000 that would kill most 2011 games.

Wow. I set a budget of under $1,500 for when I finally decide to build my pc.

It might make a difference if you are editing films.

Enough difference to warrant the extra $800 for just the processor? Also for $6000 you could buy a new computer every 2 years that would be better than the one mentioned in the above post.

:shrug: It was a hypothesis.

Once you pass a certain point, I would say around $2000, the amount of power you get per dollar starts to level out. After about $2000 you're just throwing money at it for a negligible increase in speed.

My total budget for all the components is $8 - 10k, which is less than what we pay for our workstations in the office. So far, I'm way under budget. As far as I can tell, the 990x is only $50 more expensive than the i7-980x. I would imagine the performance difference is appreciable, however dropping down a couple of levels to the quad-core i7-950 or 960 would save several hundred dollars.

The price difference is huge, worth considering.

At my office I use a 12-core MacPro and my understanding is that the extra cores help to reduce the time required for rendering and encoding tasks, which I will be doing a great deal of. Maybe I need to do a bit more research to determine how much time I would actually save with an i7-990x vs 950 or 960.

I've been looking at this CS5 benchmark comparison

http://ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.html

http://ppbm5.com/Interpreting.html


If I understand correctly from reading the anolysis, my takeaway would be that an overclocked 6-core i7-980x paired with NVIDIA GTX 580 performs CS5 tasks almost as well as a 12-core Xeon E5680 dual processor with 48GB RAM. And the 8-core Xeon E5620 doesn't even come close to the 980x.

In the CPU test MPEG2-DVD the 980x beats the 8-core Xeon E5260 system by 25 seconds!
CPU test H.264 BR the 980x beats it by over 30 seconds!

So unless I'm reading this incorrectly, it seems that:

1. dual E5680 / i7-980x would be pretty comparable

2. dual E5620 not worth the extra cost

3. i7-990x - probably best option or at least on a par with dual E5680s

If this is for work at home, are you able to write off the expense to your job? Because if that is the case, go ape[censored].