Looking to upgrade cheaply

[JanG]

So I'm finally looking to upgrade a little bit. I want to make 1 or 2 general upgrades. I want to make editing with Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 faster.

Here's what I have:

768 MB RAM (not DDR or whatever that is)

processor: AMD XP 2700+ 2.17 GHz
(the bus is only 300 and not 333 i'm told)

NO video card.

So what should I get? A cheap video card? More RAM? Another motherboard? what is the most important next step? I was thinking about buying 512 or another 1 GB of RAM, that seems pretty cheap. Would that give a huge boost, or does that much start to do nothing? If I was go get video card for cheap, what do you recommend? I'll probably make purchases on newegg.

[MOVIEGEEK]

"If I was go get video card for cheap, what do you recommend?"

I recommend at least an ATI 9550 or nVidia 5200,make sure you get the right one for your motherboard(eg AGP,PCIe,PCI).As for RAM you should be fine with what you have but a little more never hurts.

[guns1inger]

The video card will make very little difference to Premiere Pro 1.5.

The most speed gain would come from upgrading the motherboard/CPU, however there is a good chance this would result in you having to also upgrade your memory as well (depends on what you have now).

I would be surprised if you didn't have DDR ram though.

[whitejremiah]

erm....if your running a 2700, you almost DEFINATELY have ddr ram.....it may be rather low end DDR ram, such as pc2100, but i can ALMOST guaruntee that it's got ddr ram in it....but yea, for that type of deal, your gonna be best off upgrading the processor and motherboard, and depending on exactly what you got in the computer right now, that may require more than "a little" upgrading and may not really be worth it for the few seconds here and there that you would gain.....

[JanG]

oh ya, sorry it's probably DDR ram.

Ok so someone is wanting to sell me computer parts at a good price but I can't afford to buy them all: here we go

it's a Gigabyte AGP motherboard

videocard is BFG 6800 GT (is that the right kind of videocard for that motherboard).
I'll probably skip it, it seems more for videogames than editing...

and 2 Gig of RAM (2 sticks). I'm definitly buying at least one of those, if not both.

And a new processor with the motherboard of course: 3500 64 bit AMD veniscore.

So right now i'm thinking: Get the Gigabyte AGP motherboard with the processor mentioned with it, and a new 7200 rpm HD to put windows on.

To the user above me, what do you mean i'd only gain a few seconds? This kind of thing might make me hold off on buying anything except for a new HD.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Encoding is CPU intensive so buying a faster one will give you the most "Bang for the buck".For every doubling in processor speed you can expect at least a 40% reduction in encoding time:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html

[EAO]

Great chart. CPU is king for transcoding encoding. Still think Athlon x2 3800+ is king for 'bang for the buck'. Easily overclocked with almost no effort. Just be prudent and methodical. However no warranty/guarantee implied on my part.