This weekend I spent several hours watching videos about how to put together a PC for different purposes. In my case I want to do music production, video editing, and game design using Unreal 5.

This particular build was specifically for gaming

Here’s a guy who specializes in video editing. I thought his metaphors (CPU is like engine, motherboard is like chassis) were very helpful.

He described how he has 3 hard drives (not disk drives, but the new NVMe solid state drives). One is for the operating system and his software; one (called D) is for data, and the 3rd one (called V) is for just video. He also has external storage, what I have always called an external disk drive, but he referred to as NAS (Network Attached Storage). He uses that for video that he is not actively working on, and also for backup.

He mentions the following site to help you figure out what power supply you’ll need for all the parts

https://www.newegg.ca/tools/power-supply-calculator/

Here is Venus Theory, who makes electronic music (using lots of plugins), creates sophisticated videos, and is also a gamer. He posted this 2 years ago

Here’s another video about building a PC specifically for music production. At the end of the video he puts it to the test by loading something like 60 instruments at the same time. He also talks about a new type of music plugin that takes advantage of your graphics card instead of doing all the work on the CPU.

Here Microcenter builds a PC for editing their in-house videos

This talks about how different parts of the PC are responsible for what part of the process

When I made videos before, I used Movavi and I’m trying to figure out what to try next. I really don’t want to get into Adobe’s subscription model. I had heard about free software called Davinci Resolve and didn’t understand how it could be free! After watching this video I understand better. I guess the business model is comparable to that of Unreal 5 (free until you make X amount of money with it; then they get a percentage of your earnings). In the case of Resolve the base version is free, but the pro version is a one-time cost of $ 300-some. The free version means that you can learn their system, then if you feel you need more features you will probably turn to them instead of somebody else. Also it eliminates a lot of piracy?

Finally, here is a video giving suggestions for motherboards that fit the particular type of CPU we have already purchased.

At this point my brain is a blur of acronyms and I still haven’t decided what kind of motherboard or graphics card to get. But I have gotten excited about the whole process instead of feeling overwhelmed by it.