CA_Steve wrote:Just so you know, old video cards have crappy idle power. The stock 9800GT uses ~35W. I can't imagine the Zotac will use much less. A current gen card will idle at 10-15W. So, any efficiencies you might hope to get by using the picopower PSU and a gaming video card without an external connector just went out the window. We don't know what resolution you want for gaming, so can't recommend a specific gpu.
Yes, quad core = good for Lightroom and Premiere. Faster is also good. So, getting some downclocked/lower TDP variant is just slowing down your apps and costing you $'s. All of these Sandy Bridge quad cores will idle at about the same power level regardless of their rated speed/TDP. Consider the i5-2500k.
Don't know how much money you want to throw at this, but the HDD will probably be your bottleneck. Consider an SSD for boot/apps.
I may try playing at 1920x1080 when I get a new monitor, but right now I'm aiming at playing at 1440x900. Being able to play at max settings isn't a priority, my goal is to have a card that plays them with decent settings. I picked this card a year ago while shopping around so there probably is another card out there that will work better.
Regarding load/idle, 90% of the time I'm editing in lightroom/photoshop/premiere and the cpu load will be flopping all over the place as I'm working. I will be editing 1080p video, I can't right now due to CPU constraints and the editing is mostly cutting and arranging clips with some effects added in.
As for my budget, I'm a little flexible here so springing a little extra (i'm talking less then $100 more) will not kill me. The reason I picked the 2500T is because I don't want the overall wattage to
exceed whatever arbitrary cap I come up with based off the final hardware build. Idle draw isn't as critical (I do want to keep it low of course) as the draw is at load.
ces wrote:
But it seems like a smaller Seasonic PSU in a PC-Q08 with a 2400 would be a reasonable proposal to make for his consideration. It will not burn up many more watts per month and will handle whatever encoding he does more quickly and crisply... and will permit him to add storage to the Q08 to store images etc in the future should he ever want to. And a 160 watt Pico PSU isn't that cheap. I don't think this will cost that much more. I think you can get a good Seasonic PSU for about $120 bucks. How much does the 160 watt Pico PSU cost?
I intended to reuse the MI-100 and modify the PSU mount to hold two 120mm fans (I have some silent thermaltakes from a previous build) to move air through it then slap a low-profile silent copper heatsink on there to dissipate heat.
As for the PicoPSU, paired with the DC power supply it would be around $90. I prefer not to use a full-size PSU as it's another vector of noise I prefer to avoid and takes up a whole lot of space in a small case (for example the MI-100 allows no room for much of anything with the PSU inside it so I would have to use a PicoPSU). On a sidenote I don't plan on expanding past that 500GB drive as everything else is hosted on the file server (only video footage is local as I don't want to deal with latency when scrubbing).
ces wrote:What memory are you using. I bought that board on sale a while back. I was planning on loading it up with 8G of the approved memory (2 sticks of Kingston KVR800D2N6/4G).
You shouldn't have any problems with approved memory, I went with a kit not on that list which is probably why it didn't work.