Tavares, FL Oct. 2, 2016
- Our TEN year anniversary is this coming Wed., Oct. 5, 2016,
- so naturally our main 7 year old Windows 7 desktop computer, "Miami", crashed and is in the shop for a new motherboard.
- THUS I have to use an older backup laptop, Atlanta, to post to the blog, which is a pain.
- BUT, we are using this as an excuse to celebrate our anniversary and build a new computer, Dallas, from scratch to handle editing and video editing duties. I describe the new system below for you computer geeks.
Fortunately almost every application I use is cloud based, so they can be used on my older alternate laptop. EXCEPT, I use Outlook email on my PC which uses contact lists, email archives, etc on the PC. Everything is backed up, but it is a pain to move email lists etc. to the old reliable HP laptop I am using ("Atlanta"), so there will be no email distribution until Miami is back.
I also cannot edit videos on this old TEN year HP laptop purchased about when this blog started, so I can't upload videos yet to the "FiscalRangersFlorida" YouTube channel.
However, to celebrate the ten year anniversary of FiscalRangers.com, I am separately assembling parts for building a killer PC graphics workstation 'Dallas" from scratch to handle video editing much better, and it should be running in 1-2 months.
I haven't built a PC from scratch since IBM 386 AT days, but I decided to do so in order to use a non-proprietary case and devices to make it easier for future upgrades plus upgrade all the technology. I have lived with a story purchased retail PC since 2005 and I am tired of it. I thought about using one of my old "AT" server towers that is sitting around, but decided instead to build Dallas from scratch. Dallas will be state of the art for video editing (similar power, but different than gaming) with these wish list components:
- Corsair "mid-tower" Graphite 600T custom computer case with several USB 3.0 ports, cable management spaces, cooling fans and ports, and multiple trays for extra hard drives.
- Corsair 650 watt CS 650M 80+ "GOLD" power supply (PSU). It is the type of power supply that has higher quality used by gamers. It uses a semi-modular cable system vs the standard rats nest of hard wired cables on cheaper PSUs, thus I can remove cables not needed, or replace them with ones with connectors needed for a device. It can handle power needs of add ons or multiple hard drives. My crashed HP Miami system only had a 300 watt power supply which may not have been enough after I added extra cards, drives and USB hubs.
- Asus X-99-A motherboard (MOBO). The MOBO has DVI and HDMI connectors for multiple monitors (which I already use on Miami); a 10/100/1000 Gigabit RJ45 Network port (my older one only runs at 100 Gigabit), and the internal circuits for moving data between hard drives, graphic chips etc. is state of the art (within a budget). This MOBO also includes Asus's latest UEFI bios management software, which even shows you the temperatures of the CPU and other areas of the motherboard AND lets you select fan settings to keep things cool (or know when to add more fans as needed, or even "cooling radiators" used by gamers).
- Intel i5 multi-core CPU (which could be upgraded later to a faster i7 depending on budget).
- Windows 10. I would prefer staying with reliable Windows 7, but Windows 10 has internal technology that makes use of newer video processing MOBO features. The downside is that some of my older, legacy software may not work with Windows 10, so I will face upgrading, or skipping use of older software.
- a 256 GB PCIe M.2 SSD solid state boot drive, which allows very fast processing of video files between the CPU and storage drive.This will also make booting Windows MUCH FASTER.
- a Western Digital "BLACK" SATA 6, 7200 rpm hard disk that can run at 10 GBps. Older SATA III runs at half the speed.
- an external 4TB Western Digital "MyBook" backup hard drive
- Cloud backup of current working files on Dropbox and elsewhere.
- A special hard disk tray for hot loading external drives for backup of applications and operating systems. The bottleneck for fast backup of the boot disk is the cable from the motherboard to the disk, so I have to find the fastest method such as an eSATA connection.
- Later, I will add a PCIe 16 graphic card designed to handle video graphic processing faster, instead of using the graphics processor on the MOBO.
- Virus checking software from a reliable provider.
- Cloud based software for article notes, etc.
- In the future, I may add a two hard disk RAID 1 system for data files which mirrors the data on both drives, thus if one fails, the second will keep running.
The scary part about building a PC is making payments on an Amazon.com credit card AND the 15-20% risk of a bad MOBO and having to remove and argue for a replacement from Asus. It seems all MOBO makers suffer quality control issues with circuits that fail, so I may be lucky and it works the first time, or I will be using Miami for awhile until Dallas is sorted out.
The MOBO and SSD drive and case will be state of the art, and I can upgrade CPU chips, graphic cards later as budget permits.
Until then, watch our posts on FiscalRangers Facebook page with links to articles elsewhere or on FiscalRangers.com, or my personal Facebook page for news. Lots of stories to cover, but can't do much until Miami is back or when Dallas is running in 1-2 months.
VJ
