This is the rough draft of the ultimate video editing computer:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Dual Core Processor $313.20

Motherboard: Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H Motherboard $164.02

Monitor: Dell UltraSharp 1907FP 19" LCD Monitor $199.95

Graphics: ATI Radeon X1600 Pro Video Card $144.00

HD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320GB Hard Drive $96.39

RAM: G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 $148.49

Case: COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW Black Aluminum Bezel $44.99

OS: Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 $109.99

Total cost: $1221 +S&H+TAX
Pretty good, huh! I'm still open to suggestions.

Yah uhuh man!

Holy cow! How expensive did you say that was...?

BASE price of $2,499

BUT you can easily nudge that price to $9,199 by simply optioning for 16GB of RAM, if you want you could round that off to about $10K if you want, just click for another hard drive or two,
and to think for 10K all you get is the wimpy 7300GT... 8O

Oh and i forget, that does NOT come with a monitor

Video editing is very stressful on two things....

CPU and Storage.

You only have one HD !!

This with drastically shrink your productivity and very, very quickly fragment your drives. At bare minimum you will need a spare media drive to record your media files to.
DO NOT record these to your Operating System drive as the render file and scratch files will slow down your system and everything else.

Trust me, spend a tiny bit more and get yourself a 80- 160GB OS drive.

Then, maybe... just maybe you'd have the ultimate video suite.


P.S. I notice you have no sound options ... If your serious about editing get yourself an external Sound card... NOT a Creative !! But ones that musicians put into DAW's ( Digital Audio Workstation ).These cost about $600 - $2500.

So if you have got yourself one of these, It would be useless without decent Monitor speakers. Again I'm not talking about creative or logitechs. You will need what's called a true monitor.
These are designed (very expensively) to give a very flat sound. This is so you actually hear what's playing, not what's being processed.
A lot of sound cards and speakers have hardware designed to boost bass and treble to make them sound good.
This is no good to you if it sounds great on your system, but sounds horrible on other systems. You need to monitor a true sound.

The same goes for Video Monitors, again a $ 1000 True monitor will show a flat picture to give a true representation of what it will look like on most systems ( It's true that no two systems are the same ).
As a cheaper alternative, CTR monitors have the best colour spectrum for a very low cost and have no ghosting in motion graphics.

To be honest, unless you speend over $5000, you won't get a Ultimate Video Suite, but....

For home videos It should suffice.. Just get the extra hard drive.

I'd recommend a Quad Core, 2nd hard drive, 64bit OS, and more RAM.

Does that case come with a power supply or did you forget to include one?

I'd go for a larger monitor and at least one more hard drive.

What software do you intend to use? Do you have any pro or semi-pro inclinations or is this just for doing home videos and web clips?

[edit]
I've been using Adobe CS 2 and I find that a 19" monitor gets really crowded and the type very small.


-B

Yikes! Actually after working at a major network TV station for twenty years I'm becoming a horrible cynic. The last straw was a couple of years ago when all the edit suites got LCDs. Of course pattern generators and vector scopes take away some of the guesswork but still... Anyway just a thought or two as I stroll down cynical street: Most of the audio material won't be coming in via the sound card these days, even a $1000 monitor won't be as accurate as it could be unless you use a spectrometer on it every few months, and the number of audiophiles with truly accurate sound reproduction is dwindling rapidly. The thought makes me gnash my teeth but I can envision audio engineers will be checking material in earbuds just to make sure the sonics don't offend the iWhatever addicts.

I think I'll go cry now...

-B

Uh...you are replying to a thread that is over a year old.

You do know that, right?

This is the second zombie thread today. Hmmmmm....strange things are afoot at the circle k