which video card?

[wingfan]

need help deciding between these two cards for another system im building..

Radeon 4850 1GB or Radeon 4870 512MB .. both are same price at my local shop.

the system will be a q6600, asus p5q board, 500gb sata drive and antec sonata III case, 22" inch samsung monitor,.. res will be 1680x1050.

no gaming, pure video editing machine (pinnacle, vegas etc..) doing HDV/DV work.

[johns0]

Radeon 4850 1GB is better if your not gaming.

[wingfan]

ya no gaming, just HDV/DV editing with apps like Vegas and Pinnacle primarily. does video editing rely on graphics card or cpu or both?

personally i have a q6600 and radeon 4870 1gb in my system and vegas 8 flys on it.. just wondering if i get the 4850 1gb will it perform just as good?

[redwudz]

Without digging into ATI specs, I'm guessing the 4870 is the overclocked version of the 4850. I have a 3870 and it's OC'd. Doesn't mean much if that's the case, just slightly better performance and it runs hotter. Even the 3870 handles Blu-ray playback and MKVs with no problem. I would check who makes the card. Many different manufacturers use the ATI chipsets, some good and some not so good.

As a sidenote, if you only have the one drive as boot, you will get a lot better performance with a second drive. The boot drive is almost constantly accessed by the OS. A second drive will improve capturing,editing and encoding performance. I use three drives in most of my PCs, Boot, Edit and Archive. The boot can be small, but the other two can be large as you want.

EDIT: With some codecs and video card setups, the video card can do some of the encoding. But normally it all depends on the CPU speed.

[wingfan]

ok thanks for the tips on the drives.

more and more research for both vegas and pinnacle show that its the cpu thats the important part. i might as well go with the radeon 4850 512MB instead and take another $50 off the price tag from the 2 video cards initially posted. seeing as the card doesnt make any difference rendering or capturing.