Basic PC Spec for premiere

Question

Hello all,
I am looking to view and edit some RED camera footage in CS5 and was wondering if anyone can recommend a decent PC spec that will be able to handle the footage ok?  I don't want to do it raw, just transcode the files and work that way.
Budget is a major issue, but have spotted this and thought it might do the trick for a basic edit:
Processor (CPU):
INTEL SANDYBRIDGE Core I5 2500K SKT1155
Motherboard:
ASUS P8Z68-V LX With Z68 Chipset (NEW B3 VERSION)
2xPCI-E (16x), 2xPCI(1x) & 3xPCI & 32GB RAM Support
Memory:
CORSAIR 8GB (4x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz i5 Memory Kit
Hard Drive:
1TB SATA2 - 3Gbp/s, 7200 RPM
Optical Drive:
SAMSUNG BLU-RAY COMBO Drive, Blu-Ray Reader & DVDRW In One
Graphics Card:
Integrated HD 3000 Graphics @ 850mhz (1100MHz Turbo)
Comes With VGA, DVI & HDMI Outputs As Standard
Any thoughts or advice would be most appreciated.
thanks
pete

Answer 1

That PC is way underspecced for RED. For that resolution, plus the fact that such footage is extremely highly compressed and extremely high resolution to begin with, you really need a dual-Xeon 12-core/24-thread workstation with 24GB or more RAM, a discrete Quadro or a very high end GeForce GPU discrete hardware RAID controller and a four-drive or larger RAID 5. The above configuration listed in your original post is woefully inadequate even for standard-definition MPEG-2 DVD because it has only one hard drive total (editing requires three or more hard drives to function properly) and because that build lacks a discrete GPU (it has only integrated graphics).
One more thing about that proposed build: It isn't the CPU that's entirely to blame; it's the poorly balanced configuration that is to put most of the blame on. That system needs a minimum of three hard drives, a GeForce GTX 560 GPU and (if working with simple AVCHD) 16GB of RAM.
So in other words, for RED you have no choice but to spend a minimum of $6,000 USD on a PC for you to even work with such hi-rez, highly compressed media at all.
By the way, why did you buy a RED camera if you're going to be left with less than $1,000 to buy or build a PC to edit with?