What's the *best* spec PC I can get for video editing?

[OM2]

Can someone advise what the *best* spec PC I should get for video editing?

From what I understand, the most important items are the CPU and plenty of hard disk?

How important is the graphics card?
How about the memory?

Is it possible to get a dual dual core PC?
i.e 2 dual core chips on one motherboard - giving in effect 4 CPU's.

Can I get any other hardware that will speed up the process of editing and rendering the video?

Thanks.


OM

[jagabo]

From what I understand, the most important items are the CPU and plenty of hard disk?

Yes.

How important is the graphics card?

Not very. For the most part a $50 card will work as well as a $500. If you plan on running Windows Vista soon you should get a card sufficient for that. Another useful feature to have is composite or s-video output that you can calibrate separately from the main monitor. TVs display video very differently than computer monitors.

There is some motion along the lines of using the graphics chips to encode video. Read up on ATI's AVIVO technology. I wouldn't buy a $500 card in the hopes that that will pan out. Buy a cheap card now, upgrade later if it does.

How about the memory?

Depends on what software you use. 1 GB is sufficient for most.

Is it possible to get a dual dual core PC?
i.e 2 dual core chips on one motherboard - giving in effect 4 CPU's.

Yes, you can even get dual quad core CPUs if you want to spend bucks. With most codecs you get vastly diminishing returns after 2 cores.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/11/30/brute_force_quad_cores/page9.html

Things may get better in the future as quad and more cores becomes the norm.

Can I get any other hardware that will speed up the process of editing and rendering the video?

There are some hardware MPEG encoders around. One is the Canopus Firecoder.

http://www.canopus.com/products/FireCoder/index.php

But if you have a fast computer and a fast encoder you may find the software runs faster.

[Krispy Kritter]

It all boils down to how much you want to spend, and then 6 months from now, it would have been 4 times too much.