$1000 Video and Photo Editing PC

There are some extra items in here to keep this rig quiet so baby can sleep - extra fans and a a controller

CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge - went high end here to help the video encoding go faster.

Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 (REV 3.0) LGA 1155 - This is a standard mid-priced motherboard.

CPU/Mobo combo: $445

Video: SAPPHIRE 100314-2SR Radeon HD 6870 1GB for $180. Will play most games with great performance.

RAM: G.SKILL Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 for $70

Case: COOLER MASTER HAF 912 a very nice mid tower case.

Power Supply: COOLER MASTER eXtreme Power Plus 460W - this is a bit light, but should be adequate.

Case/PSU combo: $76

Extra power cable: 8 Pin mobo power extension for $7 - will help with cable management.

Extra case fans: COOLER MASTER R4-S2S-124K-GP 120mm Case Fan for $19

Fan Controller: ZALMAN MFC1 Plus-B Black 6 Channel Multi Fan Controller for $40 to keep the fans at minimum sound.

SSD: OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G 2.5" 60GB for $95. For you OS plus video editing software and favorite games.

HDD: SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB for $55

DVD: LITE-ON Black 24X DVD for $21

OS: Win7 64 bit for $100

Heat Sink: COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus for $30

Total price: $1138 after rebates. If you wanted to reduce the cost some, you could replace the CPU with an I5-2500k and/or drop the SSD

NVIDIA Graphics are a better idea than that radeon, especially for video production. GTX 560 Ti seems to be the sweet spot right now.

I have heard that some video editing programs work better with Nvidia. Not sure which ones - does anybody have a round up of popular programs, perhaps? Some video editing programs seem to utilize graphical memory, others do not. Others say CUDA, and some even say an AMD 5750 has plenty of horsepower.

KueB, it would be worth a google on your software brand to see what other users have experienced.

Regardless of that discussion, I picked my selection based on Tom's recommendations for gaming: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card-...

Adobe, in particular, certifies their products for use with NVidia graphics cards - specifically the GTX 470 and more expensive workstation cards, but most other flavors of these cards can be modified very easily to fully support CUDA (on the drivers side of things).
Tom's Hardware does their CS5 testing on a GTX 480 system: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/adobe-cs5-cuda-64-b...

If you are not using Adobe products, then it certainly would be a good idea to google search your intended software and find out what other users recommend, per eloric's recommendation.

And none of my input is intended to downplay the potential that a Radeon 6870 may have ;0)