In addition to the Gaming PC Build April 2013, I also recently did a build for a friend of mine that needed a new PC for video editing. He has been getting by editing on his laptop, but wanted something much more powerful. With this new PC he should be able to tackle projects of pretty much any size and turn work around faster.

So what do you do when you are in need of a serious media PC? You go get yourself a Core i7-3930k of course. The 3930k is a beast of a six core processor with Hyper Threading, giving you a nice total of 12 threads to chew through video encoding tasks. The 3930k doesn’t come cheap though, and neither do the LGA 2011 socket motherboards that you are forced to get as well. However we decided that we should either do it right or not do it at all, and went all in.

Of course with nearly half of our budget spent on the motherboard and processor alone, we had to cut back on a few of the other components to still meet our budget. So instead of loading up on tons of RAM from the beginning, we went with a workable 16GB of 2x8GB DIMMS with the option to upgrade later on. The ASUS P9X79 LE has the ability to expand up to 64GB later on should he decide he needs it. Aside from the motherboard and RAM, the next biggest cost was going to be all of the storage. We went with an Intel 240GB SSD because we wanted the reliability of the Intel’s higher quality NAND to handle the heavy workloads he will be throwing at it. We also got two 3TB Seagate drives to use as storage. I am not a particularly big fan of Seagate, however the price of their 3TB drives cannot be beat. Plus, Western Digital doesn’t yet offer Blue drives in large capacities, and their Black drives are too expensive for this build. Six terabytes of storage might sound like a lot, but he will actually probably need to upgrade that down the line. The P9X79 has enough SATA ports for him to add additional drives down the road. The rest of the build was pretty standard.

Then we went ahead and thew in a Geforce GTX660 TI. This is the card I have been going to for a while. It has an excellent price to performance ratio, and supports some cool Nvidia only features such as PhysX and 3D Vision surround. With this card the PC is not just a great media rig, but can also kick some serious gaming ass. You can see the full specs below:

• NXZT Phantom 410
• ASUS P9X79 LE X79
• PNY GTX660 TI
• Intel Core i7-3930k
• Corsair Vengeance 16GB
• 2x Seagate Barracuda 3TB
• Intel 335 Series 240GB SSD
• Corsair Hydro Series H60
• LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray Burner
• Corsair CX750
• Microsoft Windows 8 64-bit

Back in April I helped one of my friends build a new gaming PC. His PC is pretty similar to mine in a lot of ways, which goes to show that I picked some solid parts back when I built my rig. The only thing I really changed up was the processor. I know this is a gaming PC and that the 3770k’s hyper threading doesn’t currently matter that much in games compared to my 3570K. However, I am betting that it is going to start to make a difference next year. The new consoles will be out by then, and you can bet that games are going to start being pretty heavily multithreaded. Both of the next gen consoles have an 8 core CPU running at pretty unimpressive speeds, so game developers are going to need to take advantage of every single core they have available. The only other difference is that he went with a 660 TI, which is a pretty solid GPU choice. I know a lot of people prefer the 7870 at this price range, but I think the support for GPU PhysX makes the 660 TI the better choice.

The full specs are:

• Corsair Graphite Series 600T
• ASUS P8Z77-V PRO
• ASUS GTX660 TI
• Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge
• CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB
• Seagate Barracuda 3TB
• OCZ Agility 3 120GB SSD
• CORSAIR Hydro Series H100i
• 2x Corsair Air Series SP120
• CORSAIR HX Series HX750
• LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray Burner
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium