Budget 4K/1080p desktop idea...

[Dustin]

Thoughts on picking up a Acer TC780 with an i5-7400 prorocessor then upgrading to 16 gb of ram, SSD and. 1050ti? They are going really cheap at $300 or even less. I could possibly be out $500 if I played my cards right.

 

Would this be an upgrade from my current system and capable of handling a6500 footage?

[Geoff CB]

7 minutes ago, Dustin said:

Thoughts on picking up a Acer TC780 with an i5-7400 prorocessor then upgrading to 16 gb of ram, SSD and. 1050ti? They are going really cheap at $300 or even less. I could possibly be out $500 if I played my cards right.

 

Would this be an upgrade from my current system and capable of handling a6500 footage?

What editing software? Premiere you want the best CPU possible, Devinchi Resolve is GPU hungry.

[Dustin]

Premiere pro- sorry thought I mentioned it.

 

current laptop is a 12’ MacBook Pro Retina with the i7 but the outdated 650 graphics card and 8gb of ram just can’t handle the footage at 4K or color grading as smooth as I’d like. 

[newfoundmass]

I know this isn't what you want to hear but it really is worth paying more now for something that will last longer than to get something cheaper that you'll need to upgrade from soon, especially when it comes to laptops that can't be upgraded. 

I love budget options, but my editing systems are usually the one thing I don't skimp on. 

[IronFilm]

Getting cheap ex-lease desktop PCs then putting in there extra RAM and a budget GPU card is a very common path many low budget gamers do for making their rig on the ultra cheap, I'm sure the same can apply to editors as well who want to save their pennies. But if you want something better you will need to aim higher. 

 

This is an extreme example of a cheap offlease PC with a GT1030 (not that I'd recommend it... get yourself at least a GTX1050 Ti instead? As you can get a low profile version of a GTX1050 Ti for US$180ish):

 

[IronFilm]

Dell Optiplex is a popular choice for offlease starter PC to use as your base, you can see lots of people have done basically this. Purchased an Optiplex then stuck a better GPU in it, plus maybe some extra RAM.

 

 

 

Some people might recommend upgrading the PSU as well (but then again he is putting a 1070 in there, even the YT Host himself says he'd recommend putting a 1050 Ti in there instead):
 

 

OzTalksHW is a channel I quite like, I've watched a lot of his videos as he has quite a few of these low budget builds:

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Dustin]

While I don’t think I would want to go as low as a 3rd gen i5, it’s nice to see these examples. I wonder with the 1070 how’d they compare to modern consoles.

 

i did find an Acer TC780 on eBay with a i7-7770 so almost current gen for $450. With a graphics card, ram (up to 32gb) and a SSD upgrade the value could be there for the right buyer! 

 

Im just trying to maximize my dollar as this is more of a hobby for me at the moment and I’m not trying to spend $1k or even $800. (That said with a monitor I’m at $600 so I might wind up just spending anyways but I don’t like to go into debt.)

[IronFilm]

9 hours ago, Dustin said:

While I don’t think I would want to go as low as a 3rd gen i5, it’s nice to see these examples. I wonder with the 1070 how’d they compare to modern consoles.

Better! You can see the various gaming tests done. 

Plus of course the PC is more versatile. 

 

9 hours ago, Dustin said:

but I don’t like to go into debt.

Agreed! Spend less then.

You can get a cheap exlease 21" monitor for like fifty bucks or so I bet. 

[Dustin]

@IronFilm Do you think an i5 7th gen with a 1050ti card is capable of handling 4K footage better than a 2012 MacBook Pro with a nvidia 650?

[IronFilm]

You mean a GT650M? Then yeah, of course. My gut tells me the gap vs a 1050 Ti will be so large I don't even need to look that up to be sure, but here you go anyway:

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-1050-Ti-vs-Nvidia-GeForce-GT-650M/3649vsm7754

[Shirozina]

5 hours ago, Dustin said:

@IronFilm Do you think an i5 7th gen with a 1050ti card is capable of handling 4K footage better than a 2012 MacBook Pro with a nvidia 650?

Neither is capable of handling 4k without significant time consuming frustrations esp with Premier Pro.

[Dustin]

2 hours ago, Shirozina said:

Neither is capable of handling 4k without significant time consuming frustrations esp with Premier Pro.

Then what are your minimum requirements? I’m actually not even editing 4K but my laptop struggles with handling 1080p (4K downscaled). I have to set it at 1/4 and color grading eats my machine alive. That said I priced out a Ryzen 5 1600 machine before at around $800 with a monitor including SSD drive, 16gb of ram and a 1050. 

[Shirozina]

1 hour ago, Dustin said:

Then what are your minimum requirements? I’m actually not even editing 4K but my laptop struggles with handling 1080p (4K downscaled). I have to set it at 1/4 and color grading eats my machine alive. That said I priced out a Ryzen 5 1600 machine before at around $800 with a monitor including SSD drive, 16gb of ram and a 1050. 

I don't know what the minimum requirements are but my '4k capable' workstation is a 6 core i7 6850 ( overclocked and watercooled to 4.4ghz) on an ASUS x99 MB, 64gb RAM, GTX 1070, 512gb SSD C drive, 512gb SSD scratch for cache files and 4x 2tb 7200rpm HD's in RAID 0 for media + 8TB drive for daily backups and numerous other drives for long term archive. I mainly use Resolve studio but  Premier Pro still struggles to playback smoothly with some 4k codecs unless I continually render. The CPU is a bit old hat now and at some point I'll probably upgrade this and the MB. The bottom line is that to smoothly edit 4k you need a pretty high spec machine and there are no cheap options or corners you can cut.

[IronFilm]

^ Yes, all this, of course the OP with their current budget has no chance of smoothly editing 4K footage natively without using proxies

[Dustin]

Thanks guys! Back to saving I go

[Andrew Reid]

1 hour ago, Shirozina said:

I don't know what the minimum requirements are but my '4k capable' workstation is a 6 core i7 6850 ( overclocked and watercooled to 4.4ghz) on an ASUS x99 MB, 64gb RAM, GTX 1070, 512gb SSD C drive, 512gb SSD scratch for cache files and 4x 2tb 7200rpm HD's in RAID 0 for media + 8TB drive for daily backups and numerous other drives for long term archive. I mainly use Resolve studio but  Premier Pro still struggles to playback smoothly with some 4k codecs unless I continually render. The CPU is a bit old hat now and at some point I'll probably upgrade this and the MB. The bottom line is that to smoothly edit 4k you need a pretty high spec machine and there are no cheap options or corners you can cut.

Transcoding the H.264 to ProRes really helps fluid 4K editing.

It helps more than upgrading the system.

To answer the OP... Yes the upgrade is worth it, 100%, over the 12" MacBook. But you will still need to convert the 4K H.264 from the A6500 to an editing codec to see the most significant leaps... Or switch to FCPX.

[Shirozina]

19 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

Transcoding the H.264 to ProRes really helps fluid 4K editing.

It helps more than upgrading the system.

To answer the OP... Yes the upgrade is worth it, 100%, over the 12" MacBook. But you will still need to convert the 4K H.264 from the A6500 to an editing codec to see the most significant leaps... Or switch to FCPX.

Transcoding to Pro Res (one highly compressed codec to another slightly less compressed) throws away  image data unless you use one of the very high end lossless codecs and then the storage size gets to be a problem - it's also time consuming and even with 4k ProRes you will still struggle to edit smoothly on the  OP's existing or proposed hardware.

[Dustin]

46 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

Transcoding the H.264 to ProRes really helps fluid 4K editing.

It helps more than upgrading the system.

To answer the OP... Yes the upgrade is worth it, 100%, over the 12" MacBook. But you will still need to convert the 4K H.264 from the A6500 to an editing codec to see the most significant leaps... Or switch to FCPX.

Thanks for the thoughts Andrew. Loving your EOSHD PRO COLOR 3 profiles on it by the way. 

[Phil A]

On 8/8/2018 at 3:28 AM, IronFilm said:

You can get a cheap exlease 21" monitor for like fifty bucks or so I bet. 

But would you want to color grade on a 21" TN panel that was run 8h for 5days a week for 3 years?

 

Also +1 to transcoding. I have a system with way better performance than what you're looking at and I still transcode all my H.264 stuff to ProRes because it's just less sucky for editing. A regular SSD or maybe 3 or 4 spinning drives in Raid0 are perfectly fine for even ProRes HQ in UHD 60p.

[Dustin]

23 minutes ago, Phil A said:

But would you want to color grade on a 21" TN panel that was run 8h for 5days a week for 3 years?

 

Also +1 to transcoding. I have a system with way better performance than what you're looking at and I still transcode all my H.264 stuff to ProRes because it's just less sucky for editing. A regular SSD or maybe 3 or 4 spinning drives in Raid0 are perfectly fine for even ProRes HQ in UHD 60p.

I’m looking at getting a Samsung usb SSD eventually. My g technology usb3 connection is getting a little wonky.

I know in Andrews guide he mentions EditReady, perhaps I need to try that! I’m kind of tempted by Final Cut Pro X. Kind of...but I’ve been cutting in premiere for about 5 years and only briefly had experience in Final Cut Pro 7. Would be nice to get off the adobe train. Would I be able to get a cheaper Mac since FCPX is so optimized?