Slumming It With Duron and a Cheap Motherboard

I wanted to try a little experiment: What would happen if we put together a workstation for as little money as possible?

At DigitalVideoEditing.com, we're always ranting and raving about systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars. But we wanted to try a little experiment here at the Midwest Test Facility: What would happen if we put together a workstation for as little money as possible? Would it be capable of doing anything worthwhile? Or, would it just prove that old saw, "You get what you pay for?"

We started with an old 350 MHz no-name white-box computer that had outlived its usefulness. We were never happy with this heap of junk. For some reason its motherboard prevented networking from functioning properly, even when we tried a succession of different network interface cards. It had a smallish hard disk and generally contained the oldest technology in the shop. We'd use it to see if editing hardware (mostly DV cards) would work on even the most primitive of computers. Then, I had an idea. Let's modify it! We'll find the absolute cheapest components available, and stoke this baby full of them, replacing those moldy, dusty old parts with shiny new ones. And then, let's see if it ends up being a fire-breather, or one that would be more at home at your grandmother's home office.

My first pick was the lowliest hard drive I could possibly find, a Quantum Fireball 20-gig disk that cost only $100. Even though it's cheap, it still uses ATA-100 (which I like better than SCSI), and can read at 27MB/sec and write at 17MB/sec. That's more than fast enough for two channels of lightly compressed video. Next I looked at motherboards and chips. The absolute rock-bottom chip and motherboard combination I was willing to accept was an AMD Duron 900 MHz chip for $75 and a Biostar motherboard for $70. Well, I suppose you could get cheaper motherboards/chips -- a friend just got a $45 mobo with a $40 650 MHz Duron to go with it, but jeez, I have my limits of cheapness!

Even though the AMD Duron is the most affordable processor I could find, it's not really a bad chip at all. Everybody's been raving about the AMD Athlon, and the architectures of Athlon and Duron are pretty much identical. The only two differences are the size of the second level (L2) cache and the core voltage. Athlon weighs in with 256 kB on-die and full speed L2 cache, while Duron has only 64 KB of L2, but the best part is that because of Duron's lower core voltage (1.5V vs. 1.8V for Athlon), it runs cooler, using the power of a 25-watt light bulb.

Then we populated one of the RAM slots with a 256MB PC133 DRAM stick for $70. The power supply in the old box was fine, so we kept that in there, and switched out the noisy old case fan for a low-output Panaflow model, which is whisper-quiet at only 21 dB. By the way, if you're building a computer, or feel like modifying the one you have, get the quietest fans you can find -- who wants to sit next to a whooshing, whining computer all day long? It's only going to cost you about $15 and it adds significantly to your quality of life.

So let's add all that up, and see what the damage was. $330. Wow! I am astonished by the amount of computing power you can get for such a comparatively small amount of money. It's amazing to me to think that a mere seven years ago, I spent double that amount just for a 16 MB RAM stick for my Mac. And the result of our modification experiment? This baby is indeed a fire-breather! This 900 MHz Duron can take whatever we throw at it. It's faster than the 1 GHz Intel boxes we have here, and is even faster than both of the twin-550 P3 dual processor machines we also use for testing.

My point here is that computer power for digital video editing is cheap, and getting cheaper by the minute. Giants like Dell and Gateway are lowering their prices, and others are retaliating by lowering theirs. Meanwhile, to replace a motherboard and processor in an existing computer is getting more reasonable, too. Why buy a whole new case, power supply and everything else when you can get the parts you need for at least $1000 less?

A final point to keep in mind -- the bulk of the heavy lifting for digital video editing is done by the capture card and hard disk. Most of the time, the processor and graphics card are just showing you the timeline. For example, I recently reviewed a Pinnacle DV500 Plus card, and even with a lame computer it could still execute spectacular effects in real time. But if you're planning on building and rendering multilayered effects, you'll need plenty of processor power. Easy. Spend a few measly hundred bucks and beef up!

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Previous Columns
Steal This Song: Napsterization of Video?
Intel Itanium Debuts: When I'm IA-64
Buying an NLE: Know What You're Doing
NAB 2001 Wrap-Up
OS X Released: Jump Into The Aqua, Or Off A Cliff?
Not Expensive Enough? Production House Chic
in-sync: Outta Sync?
Windows XP: She's Too Fat For Me
2001: A Look Ahead
2000: Looking Back
Christmas List 2000
What Are We? Video Editors or Computer Geeks?
What Ever Happened to HDTV?
Apple Stock Heads Toward Bottom of the Barrel
Editing for Content
Looking Ahead: The Age of Spiritual Editing?
SIGGRAPH 2000 Roundup
Fix it in the Mix?
NAB 2000 Wrap-Up
Mac? Just Another Pretty Face
The Digital Video Editing Crystal Ball
Thank-You Note to Santa: Thanks for Bringing These NLEs For Me
What's With This 24p Stuff, Anyway?
Digital Video's Pizza Syndrome
HD Video Editing is Here. Now.
Welcome to Digital Video Editing.com

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