Need new Video Editing computer.

I’m just having a hard time getting my head around you're not building one yourself.
Those days a long gone! Today, and for the last 10 years, it's cheaper to buy a desktop ready to customize than buy the same parts and then build it from the parts.

I also have not kept current with the latest technology either. So that's why I like getting advice from different people I respect know what they are talking about.
 
Dell has always had me wary. Proprietary power supplies. Their own idea of form factor. Bloatware. Funky cooling methods. Minimal bios/uefi settings. Great for the guys and gals who need a pc and are blinded by the cool cases.
And folks making the likes of the Nvidia 4XXX GPU's ditching warranty claims because of rampant melted power ports, seemingly poor pcie port mechanical fortitude.
Don't believe me? Northridge Fix and better yet. Northwest Repair on YouTube may change your thoughts.

Linus Tech Tips is always slapping together robust desktops for their own guys.
And they benchmark them. Cinebench, Furmark. So does Northwest Repair as a defacto standard when testing GPU repairs.

We had a discussion of your preferred OS and the applications that you've become accustomed to using.
And a bit of reluctance to adapt to newer versions. Nothing says you can't upgrade your hardware to something that surpasses what you're used to using and install an older OS of your choice and keep rocking on.
When you go rogue with Windows versions that bypass obsolescence and all of the crap that you'll never use.
Or install the features and services, etc. on demand. Well. There are ways.

Sometimes just a good washing out of the cpu socket, ram sockets. And repasting the heat sink(s) works wonders.
But for God sakes stay away from any "liquid metal" heat sink compound. I still use good old fashioned "Desitin" zinc white stuff that gets all over my fingers and clothes.

A bad coin cell. Drooping psu. Dirty port contacts. Maybe a failing graphics card or memory on it.
Or just plain old and beat motherboard with toasted capacitors in the power rail.

I have 2 store bought pc's. Both Asus. I don't know why. From owning Gigabyte, MSI, "name brand" boards with real good power supplies and top notch ram. I just keep using them. Although I do hear that their quality has degraded.
Crap like active lighting that the gamers live for. Haven't looked lately if they have business or server class main boards and components. Oh well.
I keep coming back to Asus. This laptop has cost me 2 batteries, a fan, slapped an SSD in it. A memory battery. Charger. Modded Win 11 that could care less if I have anything more than Secure Boot.
When did I get it? 5-6 years ago. And the other is a 'screamng' ROG gaming lappy.
You can't really call it a laptop unless you like your lap lobster red.

One request that I do get with Dell owners is to just wipe the damned thing clean. Get rid of the backup partittion.
And just install Windows. Just Windows only. No Dell this and Dell that. A few core applications, Show them where their previous backed-up stuff is located. Happy campers.

For me? You cannot beat a custom home built pc made with standard form factor components.
If you're all paranoid (or triple-noid) about "vulnerabilities", a "remote attacker", "exploits".
Stay the heck away from those sites (sights??). Get a good email client and use it. I use Thunderbird.
My ISP, Gmail, Yahoo email works just fine. Any garbage is captured very well. Rules, filters, sub folders. Easy.
You don't need 47 different virus and malware programs running and fighting each other. Be smart. You're a smart guy. I proved that straight away with a buddy who had been a believer of AVG, some other crap or years.
Draggy pc, slowdowns, laggy. Let Defender do it's job. And stay away from McAfee anything.
Installing a downloaded application? Custom install and see how much garbage they try to slip in past you.

my rant for the day.
kirk out.
 
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You cannot beat a custom home built pc made with standard form factor components.
If you're all paranoid (or triple-noid) about "vulnerabilities", a "remote attacker", "exploits".
As a basic element of rolling your own, have you looked into buying a good case lately? Good cases with expansion options (especially drive bays) are really hard to find. Not that the off-the-shelf computers are any better but DIY is getting much harder.
 
The company you should look to for these industrial grade systems is what I turned to to build my original Video editing computer. SuperMicro Computers. They aren't cheap but they do have a large tower with 6 PCIE slots and a stack of hard drive bays. Mine had 9 bays with dual optical drives. 1200 watt power supply and liquid CPU cooling. I just speced out the match to the Dell system and it was $2000 more for similar specs but much smaller case in the Dell with only one PCIE slot that I can see as the other two are used and covered by the RTX graphics processor.

After carefully weighing in my needs for my hobby vs my former business, the Dell should work out just fine as long as it works as claimed. I only need one PCIE slot for the Digital video Firewire card that I may use for digitizing some of my old DVCAM camera originals. I can use an external optical drive and a dock for plugin hard drives.

Anyway, the new Dell just arrived so I'll be busy now getting it all configured and ready to go to work.
 
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The setup just took 40 minutes. Pulled in all my last backup but I still have to figure out the audio and then reinstall the apps I need. No apps were installed from the backup, only document files like pdf manuals and excel spread sheets. It does have a D drive NVME 1TB for my video work drive. I added 2 of my Hard drives which has my licensed music library so that is good. There is bracket to mount a third HD and cable ready.

The DRAM is a 32GB single as opposed to 2 - 16GB so I just need to buy one to get up to 64GB.


Bad news is the slot I was planning to use is blocked by the RTX graphics as it takes up 3 spaces. I wonder if there is a Firewire to USB 3.0 adapter??? Otherwise I'm not sure how I will be able to digitize the DVCAM deck output.
 
I wonder if there is a Firewire to USB 3.0 adapter???
DVCAM is already "digitized" (the "DV" part).

I kinda doubt you'll be able to find a Firewire to USB 3.0 adapter. USB 2.0 is widely available. Maybe a PCIe Firewire card for the other computer?

Steve Jobs wasn't kidding when he said that Firewire was dead -- he was just a few years premature. Plan on making these your last Firewire transfers.
 
Maybe a PCIe Firewire card for the other computer?
I'm quite familiar with Firewire.

Having been in the video business since early 80's I've been through just about every video system in existence and have the decks here to prove it.

I do have a firewire PCIE card I pulled from my old system and can plug it into the other computer but then I'd need to transfer the file to the new one. So just looking for a shorter pathway. I also have a card to digitize analog video with L+R and S formats to digital too. The nice thing with firewire is with a professional deck I can control the deck inside of Adobe Premiere Pro. Some things we just give up when going to modern.
 
Doing some info collecting on this computer now.
The time to do that was before purchase. ;)
Here is an image of the MB for you to see what's in this.
That's one goofy looking motherboard. As long as there is room to slip in some SATA cables underneath the display adapter, you should be okay.

Custom power connector and the second m.2 slot is limited.
 
I’m surprised there isn’t a PCIe x4 slot above the x16 slot. The HP Z240 workstation I just set up this week has 4 PC Card Slots, it seems your Dell has only three.

There might be a low-profile PCIe cable that can plug into one of those slots and let you mount the FireWire card internally. Not sure if you could run the FW jacks to a 2.5” drive bay for access.
 
Damn Dell. Not known for expansion ports either.
There are in fact 1394 to USB 3.0 adapters. Shop and choose wisely. Read independent reviews first.
1394 is supposedly unavailable by default in Win 11. But apparently can be easily. If you have the appropriate chipset.
And if you ever move that graphics card so much as a millimeter, do it like it's gold. Chances are it's more valuable than the whole computer.
There are pci express risers and extenders out there. So if you have an open slot, one may fit the bill.
I'm a bit wary of them. But your firewire thingy's are probably a smoldering ember compared to today's tech.
Wow! Only 2 ram slots!!
 
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I also saw an m.2 card that presents an internal PCIe x1 slot, but the USB to FireWire may be more usable in the future.
 
The time to do that was before purchase. ;)

That's one goofy looking motherboard. As long as there is room to slip in some SATA cables underneath the display adapter, you should be okay.

Custom power connector and the second m.2 slot is limited.
Yeah the entire interior is goofy. But I can see they made quick access to swap stuff easier than my old system.

While there is two trays for standard HD at the top I found space for a third drive from my old system on the bottom. I have a tray that will allow me to make this location an easy swap between SSD drives, but for most projects I'll just likely leave the HD in there as it contains library of video I source from often. The top center space is more difficult to make a mount for. The MB has one open SATA drive port for the third HD so that is good, I just need a power cable to reach to the bottom.

The custom power connectors have several unused so they will work with a variety of graphics boards.

The M.2 sticks are 1TB each and the one near the memory is for the C drive with those multiple partitions. Not messing with those.

I had quite a bit of trouble getting the audio to work. It was not the computer but rather my 7.1 AVR which only has LR analog input but lots of digital inputs. Seems strange Dell made this great gaming computer but the audio out is all analog. No digital audio output. My editing suite is equipped for 7.1 speakers. I need to do some more research into this. I rarely do video projects for 7.1 or even 5.1 but I do miss the sub-woofer. Right now I got the LcR working but no subwoofer. I may need to add a small amp just for the subwoofer.

Ordered two new matching DRAM to match the specs of what's in there for 64GB.

What did you mean by the second M.2 slot is limited? It's already formatted for 1TB. Should be more than enough for my projects. They are pretty easy to get to to swap out if needed.

The one thing I'm not going to add from my old system is the Oculus Rift system. Instead the Meta Quest 3 is much simpler and connects wirelessly. Plus it is much higher quality and has pass through.

I ordered a firewire to USB cable. I wonder if the protocol is usable. If it doesn't work, it looks like it is a swap through my daily computer that has two slots available.
 
Somewhat off topic- This morning I had to visit the doctor's office for my quarterly Pacemaker checkup. The tech drags this new system out which was just an ipad and keyboard. She said the rep from Medtronic came in and delivered this new system. Well, it didn't work. I said I hope you still have the old computer. Fortunately, they had it stored in the closet and got it out to do my checkup. Seems the geniuses at Medtronic decided to go with all new Blue Tooth connection to the ICD PaceMaker. And my device is older and only connects with a loop to receive system data and the loop needs to be no more than 3-5 inches away.

So here we go with another new computer that can't read the older devices. I just had to laugh as it is so common to what I have to go through in the video business.

So we were joking about that and then they said I was the only one left with the older unit. I wonder if all the other patients are dead??? Anyway the system documented my battery only has 5 months left so it's time for me to get the new one with Blue Tooth.
 
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What did you mean by the second M.2 slot is limited?
The description says that it is for a Wi-fi module. It is also set up for a short board. This often means that it isn't a full-blown connection and instead of PCIe, you get a SATA speed connection.
 
The description says that it is for a Wi-fi module. It is also set up for a short board. This often means that it isn't a full-blown connection and instead of PCIe, you get a SATA speed connection.
You were looking at the wrong description. The WIFI / BT modules in the socket lower right on the board. There are 2 M.2 sockets and those were populated with 1TB drives. The WIFI / BT module has a wire coming off that goes to the back panel where you connect an external antenna.
 

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