Originally posted by jony218:

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For video editing I would worry more about getting a larger hard drive, and a quality power supply.

I have a coreduo 6300 ( with ECS P4M800PRO-M motherboard) and 1gb of kingston 533 memory (cost 189.00 cpu/mb combo), I also have a amd64 x2 4800 (with ECS NFORCE6M-A motherboard) and 1gb kingston 533 memory (cost 109.00 cpu/mb combo). Like everyone else I bought the intel coreduo because everyone said it was the fastest rig out there, but recently I couldn't pass up the deal on the amd 4800. The amd 4800 after using it for several months, is just as fast as the coreduo when it comes to encoding Xvid.

It's a big jump in performance when going from a single core to a dual core, when before I could encode 2 Xvid in 6 hours, now I can encode 3 in the same amount of time.

I have 3 hard drives on my video encoding machine, one is the system hard drive, one drive that stores my input video projects, and the last drive is where my finish output video is stored. Make sure all your hard drive's have fan's on them, or at least have a case fan blowing on them. Spend at least $50.00 on a power supply, I wouldn't get anything under 400 watts.

My recommendation is to get the coreduo 6850, only because the price premium on the quad isn't worth the 10 - 15 minutes you might save on 2 hour project. Most of my projects I just leave them running overnite. Also don't overlook the UPS that can shut down your computer during a power failure.

I'm getting ready to upgrade again and replace the coreduo6300, this time I'll be going with the amd x2 6000, only because it's $80.00 cheaper than a comparable intel cpu. The quality between the intel and amd is about the same, the only difference is one is a few minutes faster than the other.

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