http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk

anybody used them? currently speccing up a PC for video editing and even when buying the components separately on novatech i cant get near their price… overclockers, scan and chilliblast dont seem to come near on price either.

of course i could be completely wrong and searching the wrong parts of the websites and such! I’m more then willing to accept i’m wrong and be given advice that’ll save me money 😀

Case
COOLERMASTER ELITE 310 BLUE CASE
Processor (CPU)
AMD PHENOM II X6 1090T (3.20GHz/9MB CACHE/AM3/) – (Special Offer)
Motherboard
ASUS® M4N98TD EVO: DDR3, 2-Way SLI, SATA 3.0GB/s
Memory (RAM)
8GB SAMSUNG DDR3 DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (2 X 4GB)
Graphics Card
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX460 PCI EXPRESS – DirectX® 11, 3D Vision Ready
Memory – 1st Hard Disk
1TB WD CAVIAR GREEN WD10EARS, SATA 3 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE
2nd Hard Disk
1TB WD CAVIAR GREEN WD10EARS, SATA 3 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Power Supply
600W Quiet 80 PLUS Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£59)
Processor Cooling
SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE CPU COOLER (£19)
Sound Card
ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (7.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Network Facilities
ONBOARD 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT – AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit – inc DVD & Licence (£79)
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Monitor
IIYAMA E2271HDS 22″ LED WIDESCREEN, HDMI/DVI-D HD 1920×1080 (£139)
Surge Protection
Belkin 4 Socket 2M Surge Protector with £25,000 Protection! (Special Offer £6)
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build – Approximately 9 to 13 working days
Quantity
1

Price: £1,032.00 including VAT and delivery

why is it that the more i research stuff the more i’m willing to spend on it 😯 (was limiting myself to 700 last week (that wasnt with a monitor though)!

Yes.

*puts on an old man voice and shakes fist*

Oh that yeti! 🙄

Needs a bigger monitor though.

Red’s faster.
Everyone knows that.

i dont think i could fit much bigger on my little computer station to be honest…. its currently got a 19″” old Philips (although later reports suggest it might just be a PC world monitor with philips written on it) monitor and there’s barely enough room either side to put the two speakers!

its a full Hd monitor i’ve chosen and widescreen which is important for video editing…. i’d hope that’d be ok?

EDIT – reds faster? is that a pc company or a joke about red computers being faster like red bikes are? 😆

Sorry Phil, I started reading, there was this loud whoosing sound above my head, and, and.. I’ll be honest I just wanted to join in, plus nobody had replied, I thought I was being helpful…

No

OK then, a second monitor, its sacrilege running a video card like that on a 22″ monitor, at least use 2×22″ !

Couldn’t you just use your current PC and patience?

got a 32″ tv to run as a second monitor and for playing stuff back on.

if i end up moving furniture around the room and make space for a bigger PC desk that would fit a second HD monitor then that would be a later addition, for now i just want a monitor that’ll fit on the desk and show me stuff in a good resolution 🙂

current PC isn’t up to handling editing programs… when it comes to full Hd clips it just looks at me at laughs.

its sacrilege running a video card like that on a 22″ monitor

It’s the resolution that counts, not the size (unless you’re planning on looking at it from the other side of the room). I suspect you’d have to go quite a lot more expensive to get beyond 1920×1080.

Looks like a pretty fast system, discs are likely to be the bottleneck. You’d get quite a performance boost by configuring those discs as RAID0 or RAID1.

i keep seeing this word “bottleneck” but it hasnt been mentioned until now with regards to the system i’ve put together…. now i’m worried! what does it mean?

thanks for the reassurance on the monitor Rio 🙂

There’s always going to be part of the system that’s slower than the rest, hence “bottleneck”. These days it tends to be discs, unless you go for an SSD – anything mechanical is inevitably slow. The rest of your system is so blisteringly fast that it will really show up any relatively slow bits.

ahhh i seee, good explanation 😀

anyone out there got any experience with pcspecialist? for price i’m struggling to find better, the mix of reviews online about the company is well.. mixed, but as with anything most people only bother commenting when something goes wrong.

never spent this kinda cash on a machine before so i’m pretty nervous about it!

so close to ordering…. any benefits in partitioning the 1st Hd… say 100gb for the OS, 400gb for program files and 500gb for storage, then leaving the second HD unpartitioned for storage?

These days it tends to be discs, unless you go for an SSD – anything mechanical is inevitably slow.

Disks have to do two jobs – find the data, and give it to you. SSDs are supremely fast at find it but less fast at returning it, vice versa for normal HDs.

So you use SSD for lots of small files where seek time is crucial (ie the OS or swap file), and normal HD for reading your data files. It might well be worth using an SSD for swap file if you can’t afford one big enough for the whole of Windows, mind. And perhaps configure your temp directories on it too – just guessing now tho.

Striped RAID will double the speed of file transfer, but NOT seek time. So ideal for large video files, but does not justify the expense for general usage apparently.

I used pcspecialist after reccomendations from other professional image makers / workers. I needed a laptop which would cope with photoshop / raw processing / album design software and do it all swiftly and reliably.

They were brilliant! There was a small problem with the build when it arrived and they went out of their way to rectify the situation. The laptop has been absolutely spot on – getting on for three years now and no real problems. Highly recommended.

@ mol – huh? 😯 too complicated for me lol

@user-removed – cheers dude! good to hear a positive review 😀

Just got one through them for work, quite a similar spec too.

Not bad, fast delivery, but I needed to repair the OS as the install hadn’t completed. Didn’t mind as I have the time to sort it and it was cheaper than anywhere else.

TBH I’ve had to do the same to Dell’s before too, suffered a few friday afternoon builds.

Rio – You’d get quite a performance boost by configuring those discs as RAID0 or RAID1.

Er…. not with RAID1. In fact, it would have a negative performance impact.

molgrips – Striped RAID will double the speed of file transfer, but NOT seek time. So ideal for large video files, but does not justify the expense for general usage apparently.

For lower seek time, you need to get faster drives or SSDs. Upgraded my workstation here at work from RAID 0 15K SCSI, to RAID 0 SSD. Whooosh it’s fast!

cheers lovewookie 🙂 cant see any reason why it would be any more of a gamble than picking up a unit from pcworld etc with regards to possible friday afternoon quality!

Very close to pressing “buy” 😀

I’d go for a couple of 6Gb SATA RAID 0 as the video drive.
What Editing software are you using?

6GB RAID 0?

Can you specifiy the temp folder location/scratch disk in the video editing software?

I’d perhaps change those disks for non-Green variants. The Green range sacrifice performance for eco reasons. I’m a “green champion” at work, but when it comes to disk speed I’d say balls to the planet and get me one that leaves scorch marks. Caviar Blue is WD’s ‘standard’ outing and Black is their ‘performance’ model (or at least, was last time I looked).

Contentiously perhaps, I’m a fan of the HGST Deskstars. They’ve got a bad name because of a few dodgy batches early on (the -GXP line was terrible), but I’ve had loads since and they’ve been great. Last time I looked, which granted was a year or two back, they battered the Caviar Blacks for performance and cost considerably less.

Random thought – is the PSU going to be meaty enough to power that lot?

Red’s faster.
Everyone knows that.

Maybe, but blue’s cooler – it all depends on your priorities

You’d get quite a performance boost by configuring those discs as RAID0 or RAID1.

No you wouldn’t. TBH, I njver read the full spec, but if disk performance is important, get 3 and RAID5 them. Striping across the disk set minimises spin time, so boosts performance and there’s a degree of resilience. Just costs one disk out of the set.

Er…. not with RAID1. In fact, it would have a negative performance impact.

RAID1 will increase the read performance but not the write. As most operations are reads it actually makes a big difference. Your boot times in particular will be noticeably faster with RAID1, as will programme load times. If you turn on disc write caching then write times are even less important but if you lose your power it can have unpredictable results as I’ve found to my cost.

Edit:

but if disk performance is important, get 3 and RAID5

A 3 disc RAID5 has the same theoretical maximum performance increase on reads as RAID1, and may or may not be better on writes. In practice I doubt you’d notice any difference.

either going to be vegas or premier depending on which processes .mov files with the least fuss! used vegas before and liked its layout but at present i’m undecided… going to try the free trials on them before buying a copy of either so i can test how they run and feel first 🙂

cheers cougar, the greens were chosen for price as well as the fact they’re green lol. the “blacks” have got a reputation for being a bit noisy i’ve read….

EDIT – forgot to answer your question, including a 20% allowance its powerful enough yeah 🙂 if i had gone for the GPU one model lwoer i would’ve been ok with a 450, but had to step up to the 600.

all this RAID stuff is making my brain hurt. i dont think you chaps quite realise how low a spec i’m going to be coming from 🙂 RAID will push my price up by a bit too much and i’m already 300 over what i originally intended to spend

mrsconsequence is having a very cheap xmas 😆

RAID will push my price up by a bit too much

You’ve already got all the bits to do RAID0 or RAID1 (MB support plus 2 discs), so it shouldn’t cost anything which is why I suggested it. If you’ve got the OS discs you can always go to RAID later – it will probably require a complete re-install though.

6GB RAID 0?

Ahem, typo 6Gb/s

Vegas and Premiere are Ok, although if you are going to be using AVCHD download the demo of Edius, it handles native AVCHD files faster than either of the others.

ahhh i seee Rio, will come with the OS disks so that makes it an option for the future 🙂 maybe if i find myself stepping up the RAM in the future or something i’ll go RAIDY on its ass at the same time 😉

For lower seek time, you need to get faster drives or SSDs. Upgraded my workstation here at work from RAID 0 15K SCSI, to RAID 0 SSD. Whooosh it’s fast!

S’what I am saying innit. Even going from seriously fast HD you’ve noticed a big improvement.

ORDERED 😀

thanks for the advice everyone, i’ll be back when it comes to entertaining the RAID idea 😉

*does little happy dance*