Recommendations for a video editing/encoding rig?

[Satyrist]

I was wondering what sort of hardware would be good for basic (no need for real-time, anytime soon anyway) video editing and encoding..Something that will do it pretty quickly.

Lately I've heard that if the software is recent, that a P4 Rig may be a better choice for editing/encoding; I was wondering what anyone might recommend in this regard.

Currently the box I have set aside, that I'm looking to upgrade:

MSI 745 Ultra (SIS 745)
XP1700+ (DL3TC JIUHB--runs at 11x166 default voltage, so far...board/memory configuration on this board stinks, not sure how much higher it can go)
512MB Kingston PC2700 (Samsung chips, only really does 2.5-3-3-3, regardless of type of memory used on this board-tighter timings, fail to post. Another reason I'm looking to upgrade it)
350 Watt Fortron P/S (120mm fan)
40GB Western Digital 5400RPM HDD
Liteon 24x burner
Pioneer 16X DVD
Radeon 8500 128MB
generic 10/100 NIC
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
Hauppauge WinTV Stereo
Promise Fasttrak66 IDE RAID (2x15GB 5400rpm HDD, RAID 0)

I recently picked up 1 gig (2x512mb) of Buffalo PC3200 memory--Winbond CH-5 chips, I wasn't sure what the difference would be, between getting a Canterwood/P4 system, or simply upgrading the board to NForce2, such as an Abit NF7-S, which is what I use for my LAN rig.

What's any recommendations here?

I also have some spare 120GB 7200 RPM HDD's (1 WD, 2 Seagate) as well, though they're the 2MB cache versions-I'm fairly aware of the memory/disk space requirements for editing video, how in this regard you can never have too much of either.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Satyrist]

ttt

 

[StraightPipe]

go with P4c, you'll want the horsepower.

Also, the ram seems good, I would probly use the 2 new cards plus the old card(s)
1 gig is good, but 2 gig's is great (if you can afford it)

If those seagates are the same model (and 7200RPM) you'll probly be ok to raid 0 them for your OS, and use the extra WD as storage.

depending on what your doing with the vids you'll probly want to get a DVD(+ and -)R combo drive.

 

[BatmanNate]

If you read Anand's review on the newer P4c chips, you'll see that they outperform the competition by quite a margin as far as DiVX encoding goes, I can attest to this. I have a 2.4c running at stock speed right now and it's faster than my dual 1500+ XP's were at DiVX encoding (and vDub is multithreaded).

 

[JoPalm]

How much difference is there between using say 512MB PC2100 ram vs 512MB PC2700. My mobo supports pc2100 and I was thinking of doing the same as Satyrist, turning mine into video editing. The only thing i would upgrade for myself though is ram and more hard drive space. XP 1700+ ok for editing?