Workstation on a Budget

Edit Geek by Don Reeve

As part of my Tickle King documentary project it became necessary for me to put together a better home edit suite than my laptop. It’s been a long time since I actually needed anything with any real power at home, so I needed to start from scratch.

I’ve built plenty of computers in the past, and postulated about building others, but this is the first one I’ve actually put together for the purposes of editing in quite a long time. I figured I’d detail exactly what I built and share the outcome.

Starting Point
Once you’ve stopped paying attention to the industry specifics of CPUs and motherboards for a few months or more it can become very hard to gauge value and performance across the wide range of hardware available.

While there are plenty of websites detailing benchmarks and so much more it’s ultimately a little futile trying to really understand it all – in the end different applications are going to utilise hardware differently.

Knowing that I’d never really make the objectively ideal choice I just picked a couple of very simple targets: An Intel processor and an NVidia graphics card.

That’s it.

I know that Avid performs best on Intel and NVidia hardware, and the Adobe suite also does well with that combo. I’m know there are fantastic offerings from AMD also, but I’m less confident in their support within the tools I need. read more...