It’s been two weeks since I got back from Vietnam and I finally feel like I’m getting back into the swing of things. I don’t know about you but after spending a month doing nothing but drinking cocktails, eating out every day and night and getting massaged every other day (no happy endings), all at a pittance mind you, it kind of feels like a drag getting back to reality. It didn’t help that I caught some nasty flu at the end of my trip.

Well the unfinished work is piling up and there’s nothing like building a new editing machine to get the motivation cranking again. Instead of going out and getting a custom built machine, being a cheapskate, I’d thought I’d save the $50 and put the bunch of components together myself. I’ve done it numerous times before and it’s really just like the adult’s equivalent of putting together a Lego set.

My budget for the whole PC including keyboard, monitors and everything else to get it up and running came to $1800au. My goal was to have something that could chew through any kind of footage I could throw at it and be compatible with the mercury engine in Adobe Premiere CS5. The result was as follows:

CPU: 2.8ghz – Currently the cheapest i7 quad core out there in the new LGA1366 socket spec.
Motherboard: – The cheapest most feature packed motherboard I could find locally. Includes the new USB 3.0 and SATA 3 specs. Good overclocking options too.
Ram: – No thrills 6GB set of ram. I’m planning on doubling this to 12gigs soon.
Video card: Zotac with 1gb of ram. With the GPU hack, I’d save a couple of hundred bucks on getting GTX285 with all the mercury playback engine benefits. This actually outperformed my other computer’s GTX285 in the Cinebench OpenGL test. I think the fact that the other computer has a Q6600 in it has more to do with that though.
Power Supply Unit or PSU: One of the most underrated components. Usually the first point of failure in a computer system so I went with a trusty psu. I wished I had paid a bit extra and got the with modular cables though. Modular cables make the build so much easier and neater.
Monitor: 23.6″ Wide LCD monitor. Doesn’t have the colour fidelity or bit depth of my Dell 24″ 2407. Really noticable in After Effects when you create any gradients and banding occurs where on the Dell it’s smooth as. It still makes an acceptable image though and at a very good price.
Keyboard and Mouse: – The worst keyboard I’ve ever used. You get what you pay for here and the keyboard is absolutely rubbish. You have to really push down hard on the buttons and if you’re a fast typer then expect to go back a lot to fill in letters that didn’t register. I don’t think they’ll offer a refund for this so I plan on doing a snuff film starring this keyboard.
Hard-drive: drive. Despite the green in the title, it’s still 7200rpm with 64mb of cache. I’ve got a bunch of other drives in ESATA cases to do the media handling.
All housed in a Black ATX Tower Case. I wanted something to look plain and sexy without looking like a neon world of warcraft base.

So how does it perform? Out of the box on stock settings, the performance in Premiere CS5 was frustratingly underwhelming. Things lagged like it was 1998 again and I couldn’t understand why. Even though it was stock, 2.8ghz should be plenty.
I soon found out what the cause was when I started to overclock the beast. The cpu underclocks itself when it’s not doing anything to save power but even when it was doing something, ie, trying to play a timeline with 7D footage in it, it wouldn’t kick into high gear and the playback kept stuttering.

To fix that I found a bios overclock setting for my combo of the i7 930 and my motherboard on the internet. Its now running at 3660MHz with the cpu throttling feature disabled and now the thing performs like it should. It now handles all sorts of heavy editing or rendering requirements with ease. I forgot to mention I also installed a cooler on the i7, otherwise it would be running at over 100degrees on the stock Intel cooler. It currently runs at around 80 degrees whilst running Prime95, ie, the most stressful thing you could do to your computer. Very necessary if you want a rock solid system. If it can run Prime95 for hours on end without crashing or coming up with an error then your computer can do normal video rendering on all cores without a sweat.

Here’s hoping Intel doesn’t come out with a must have CPU with 52 cores in the next year or so. That would really piss me off.

Update (30/07/10): These i7 chips are really stellar overclockers. I now have the computer running at the magic 4GHz mark with the Coolermaster V8. I could bump the voltages higher and go faster but 4GHz is plenty for now.
When you’re doing actual work on these computers, stability is extra important. Some other stress test programs I’ve found to make sure your computer is running rock solid are:
IntelBurnTestV2 Stresses your cpu more than Prime95. Expect up to 10c higher temps.
LinX Similar to IntelBurnTest. Find out whether your overclock is stable quicker than with Prime95
Memtest When you overclock your base clock speed, chances are you’ll also be overclocking your ram. Use this to see if your ram runs error free.