Hey guys, hoping for some suggestions from the gurus for how I should spend my money.
My max for hardware is around $600. File storage is already taken care of with 9TB of USB3 drives. Past experience has shown me that I personally don't need more than 50GB of SSD as main storage for a Win7 system, so skimpy suggestions on that will be good.
I don't play PC games. Zero.
I'd like a small case since I just have a little room in a modest apartment, however I have my eye on a PCIe capture card that is full-length. My understanding is that this limits my options to a subset of Mini-ITX cases aimed at HTPC users who also want to install a long graphics board. The one I saw that is aesthetically pleasing to me is called Bitfenix Prodigy.
When I asked on Doom9 for the best x264 encoding FPS/$ ratio, someone suggested i7-4770. That seems unrealistic for my budget (at $320 it's over 50% of my total), but hopefully I'm wrong. I also want high single-threaded performance, since I've never been brave enough to tackle Avisynth-MT for more than a few weeks.
Does RAM size affect x264 performance much? If not, as little as 4GB will do me fine for my other tasks.
My max for hardware is around $600. File storage is already taken care of with 9TB of USB3 drives. Past experience has shown me that I personally don't need more than 50GB of SSD as main storage for a Win7 system, so skimpy suggestions on that will be good.
I don't play PC games. Zero.
I'd like a small case since I just have a little room in a modest apartment, however I have my eye on a PCIe capture card that is full-length. My understanding is that this limits my options to a subset of Mini-ITX cases aimed at HTPC users who also want to install a long graphics board. The one I saw that is aesthetically pleasing to me is called Bitfenix Prodigy.
When I asked on Doom9 for the best x264 encoding FPS/$ ratio, someone suggested i7-4770. That seems unrealistic for my budget (at $320 it's over 50% of my total), but hopefully I'm wrong. I also want high single-threaded performance, since I've never been brave enough to tackle Avisynth-MT for more than a few weeks.
Does RAM size affect x264 performance much? If not, as little as 4GB will do me fine for my other tasks.