Well, lets say about $5000. tops 
If you could configure a Windows 11 box to offer optimum Topaz Video AI performance, what would you select? How would you configure your ādream machineā.
Talking processor, memory, and graphics card parameters and anything else that would minimize processing time. (Workstation as a choice OK if there are clear efficiencies to be had).
This is my current rig but the Suprim X was dead after day one and replaced by an ASUS Rog Strix OC. Shown prices are from summer 2023.
5000 might not be enough.
My desired results are not as lofty as most: DVD to FHD or clean up FHD.
Hereās the link on PC Part Picker.
Iām not totally sure about the RAM. Maybe I could get some better fast stuff.
The SATA drives could be replaced with 4TB versions. They are super needed to read from a pool of two and write tiff images to the pool of the other two. Most of the items that donāt have a price available are parts I already own.
I chose the 9070 XT because it gets the same speeds in Gaia and Nyx as a 5090 doesāand itās a lot cheaper.
Hereās what I presently have:
Board: ASUSTeK PRIME Z790-P WIFI
Processor: 3.00 gigahertz Intel 13th Gen Core i9-13900K
Memory: 32 Gigabytes
Drive: Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti
So, not too shabby and close to your set-up, but just looking for better.
I understand drive pooling, but was unaware of the specific need for efficient TAI use. Do you have a link to guidelines so I can dig deeper?
The 9070 XT would be my choice as well.
I think the the 4070 is a disadvantage here. The 4080 would probably have come closer!
I just have anecdotal experience.
A three hour movie converted to FHD tiff images can be like 3+TB of space. Your drive needs to be able to write at like 400MBps consistently for 2TB or so to not be the bottleneck. I was using cheap 2TB SSDs, but once the cache filled up on them, they dropped to writing at like 20MBps. Thatās why I first tried pooling drives. In the end Itās only used to make a drive thatās big enough to hold all the images in one folder.
Those enterprise drives I listed probably donāt need to be pooled. They can write at 400+MBps while filling the entire drive. I just wanted to put the most extreme option on there since āMoney is no objectā. Itās probably cheaper to get 6 2TB ones and pool them than to even get one of those drives.
If you go NVEe you donāt need to worry at all about the drive write speed, so long as itās big enough. Or if you donāt do lossless output.
4070 is two years old - 4080 was not available at the time.
I think that better is to wait for how Starlight evolve and also for next generation of cards.
I was thinking about 9070 as well, but things started to change and Iām able to run Starlight mini still on 4060Ti without any issues
postet specs looks good except Intel CPU is nogo for me, I like AMD. I would also invest into HighEnd PSU and purchase Seasonic Prime Titanium. You get world highest efficency and outstandig quality for say about 100-150 bucks more, but most donāt understand the PSU is very important, absolut stable voltage, less heat, lower energy costs and Japan HighEnd components gives higher durability and protects your expensive gpu
Edit. So things chages, the 9070XT is no more an option when you focus is Starlight mini. At the moment itās perhaps better to wait if you have a aceptable running card.
Meh. Starlight Mini has unusable circle-dot patterns that get applied like a filter on vegetation. I have not tested it to see if it modifies facial expressions like Starlight does, but thatās also a deal breaker.
Maybe the next version will be usable, but by that time, they will have made Starlight Mini work on all the systems. So, still a good choice.
I donāt have a big personal configuration but if I had the budget, I would put a good 1 TB NVMe SSD for the system and software, a second 4 TB NVMe for video processing renderings, and 4 x 16 TB in raid 10.
yes doubling speed with a raid10 is nice
So you are saying Raid 10 would result in faster frame rates times?
Not faster frame rate but faster read&write speed, Raid 1+0 is mirroring and striping,
the speed is almost doubled, but you loose the diskspace of 2 HDs, 4x16TB gives you 32TB
OK - get it.
Is 16TB the minimum or is this an arbitrary capacity?
There is no minimum since we are talking about hard drives. It all depends on how much storage you need on your PC. It can be 1 TB x 4, 1 TB x 8, if you put 4 clusters of two disks, it can be 10 TB x 4 etc.
