how critical are specs

[johndh]

When looking at all the different varieties of ram say for example ddr3 tri channel 6 GB total, how important are all the other specs that go with them in regards to noticeable speed differences. Is it worth the price difference say for Patriot Viper Tri Channel 6GB PC10666 DDR3 Memory - 1333MHz versus Patriot Viper Tri Channel 6GB PC12800 DDR3 Memory - 1600MHz.This is almost a $100 price difference at Tiger Direct. I am using this example assuming a CPU and motherboard that can accommodate them and for video editing.
Also basically same question in regards to hard drives, buffer memory and spindle speed?

 

[wiretap]

Mostly, it matters when overclocking, or if you want faster memory speeds and more memory bandwidth. For video editing, especially HD, I'd go with the most memory bandwidth you could. DDR3-1600 will deliver that, assuming you set it up properly in your BIOS once you have the system built. You'll also want to look at CAS latency times. For DDR3-1600, a CAS latency of 8 is the best you'll do without spending an arm and a leg and it will do just fine for editing video.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3_SDRAM

For your hard drives, you'll want fast drives and lots of storage space, and this is even more important for HD video editing. You'll want to run a RAID-0 array for speed with a hardware RAID card if you're doing anything more than just family videos. I'd recommend picking up some Western Digital 1TB RE3 drives with a nice RAID card from a company like Areca, Adaptec, 3ware... or Highpoint if you're on a budget.

One of the biggest concerns of editing video is hard drive throughput. Once you get several layers of video up and you're trying to edit, a single hard drive struggles to keep up and you'll often get errors and crashes. This is why I'd recommend RAID -- for the speed you need. I used to do professional turnkey video editing builds and people always wanted to skimp on the budget for good hard drives and RAID cards. I often came back and had to install them a new storage array with a good RAID card because they'd consistently get errors or crashes once they tried to edit several layers of raw video.

 

[TemjinGold]

Outside of benchmarking, you will not notice ANY difference between the "fastest" and the "slowest" ram.