Quote:
Originally Posted by stickyfingerz
As big as your budget can afford. As much ram as your os will support. As big of a video card as you can afford.  Btw they do have videocards that take over part of the video encoding processing now. Look into the new Nvidia cards and software that handles that. Its currently on my upgrade "list". |
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3374
the video card encoding isn't quite there yet but should be humming in another 6mnths
4Gb is the addressable memory limit in 32bit OS's
Personally I use Vista SP1 with 4Gb and a Q6600. Since video cards won't help you YET I would just get a radeon HD card which has real nice DECODER for playback acceleration. (I bought a $70 one since I don't really ever play games but watch plenty of HD content and don't want it eating my CPU.
Like others have said 8 core isn't far away so don't build your "dream" system right now. Gather core parts that you can use later on. When the Video ENcoding comes along then maybe SLI will be worth it but for now just get a real nice motherboard and a low end quad core and a massive power supply.
For hard drives I use 2 640Gb WD drives striped for max performance and I keep my "storage" on other drives.