Building a video editing PC. What should I aim for?

Or rather what is the most important component in a PC for video editing? Beside CPU of course. Would I need a buttload of RAM or a good video card? I heard from some online video maker that his PC has 16 GB of RAM, while another has 24 GB of RAM. Would I really need to aim for that much RAM? I do BOTH 480p and 720p, not thinking about 1080p yet.

For video card, would a beefy gaming card be enough?
 
I am by no means an expert, but I've played with this stuff for a while a couple of years ago, so please take don't take this as gospel:

You'll want lots of fast storage, probably with redundancy. A hybrid Raid solution might be good to increase your speed and have a bit of safety too.

A ton of RAM is important as editing software caches as much as possible to enable fast and smooth access to individual frames (you'll be doing a lot of re-winding and forward-winding using a dial, you can imagine how slow this would be if all was on disk). You can do this with not much RAM but the video preview quality and/or amount of frames you can cache suffers.

I don't know how important the CPU is. I suppose if you're doing lots of effects extra grunt might help, same with GPU if some CUDA stuff is available to you. I doubt you'd need a beefy gaming card.

/edit Actually CPU is important, I'm forgetting rendering and compression. More cores the better. Will probably also aid the preview quality.
 
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RAM is dirt-cheap compared to what kind of benefit it can get you. For my own next PC I'm intending to get something with as many slots as possible and slam the biggest sticks in there that I can find. Who needs SSD's if you can create 32GB ramdisk anyway? :)
 
memory has got incredibly cheap, about 83 to 108 euros here for 16GB or 126 to 155 euros for 24GB.

so even if you want to go cheap (i.e. a 500 euros PC) you would have 16GB memory as a baseline.
if no GPGPU (i.e. only CUDA worth mentioning) then you're only displaying 2D and video, an IGP is enough.

for a minimal computer I'm figuring out an am3+ 880G motherboard, phenom II X4 955BE, 16GB PC10600, two 7200 rpm hard drives (one as the "source" and one as "target" to spread I/O between them?), an Antec 380W PSU.

very cheap and we may build up from there :). or leave it around that maybe if you only want an usable rig, I guess it's more than usable, it stomps every high end laptop.

maybe have a raid 0, or even a raid 10 to store your source materials.

2600K is the obvious powerhouse. buying a used 1366 socket setup and putting 24GB would be a fun option (or getting it new with a slower CPU as the trade off)

graphics card for the GPGPU needs not be a huge gas-guzzling one so you may look at a GTS 450 with 1GB gddr5, or a GTX 550.

beware of windows 7 premium having an artificial 16GB limit :p
 
You could save a TON by going with 2500(k) instead of 2600k. The tiny frequency difference is imho not worth the extra cost.
 
but the hyperthreading does work out well (it's the ideal workload for it), so it ends up 25% faster here for instance

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/778-6/avidemux-x264.html
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/778-7/mainconcept-h-264-avc-pro.html

phenom X6 does not come out bad either, core i7 950 is not slaughtered at all, to my surprise they both equal the 2500 and only 2600 has an edge.
that's just two results but with a relevant workload.

so I believe either of the three sockets is an option and it's down to particular preference.
here is one good looking am3+ board (they are now presumed to be compatible with bulldozer 2.0)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157272&Tpk=870 extreme3
 
Get a new i7 processor. Get 12 gb of ram. Get an ssd if you can and plenty of fast internal storage a few black editions would do nicely...raid them if you want. Get an nvidia video card if you are going to use the CUDA capability that Adobe Premiere CS5.5 has. If that is indeed what you are going to use as your editing suite.
 
SSD! Can't believe suryad is the first to recommend that.

I think even for rendering the 2500k is plenty. You can spend the money saved on a better GPU or bigger SSD.
 
I'll add to the chorus recommending fast storage in addition to lots of RAM (especially since it's so cheap) as your primary focus and then fit the rest of the components into your remaining budget. Effects can be GPU-accelerated and encoding is a process that can run unattended at the end of your project, so you don't necessarily need a top-shelf CPU.
 
I would consider getting a proper IPS lcd panel, as the common TN type have rather poor color reproduction / viewing angle. If you're color grading and post-processing w/o accurate color than you are kind of working blind. As a bonus if your doing serious editing you probably need more screen real estate anyway, so shift the controls and whatnot over to the old TN.
 
Oh yeah, I forgot to ask. Should I go for a lot of RAM or fast RAM? Faster RAM is more expensive so I can't have as much as cheaper slower RAM. Which is better?
 
If you aren't going to overclock the speed of RAM will not matter almost at all. If you can't fit your working set to RAM you will be MASSIVELY slowed down.

So I'd go for quantity for RAM before speed.
 
Oh yeah, I forgot to ask. Should I go for a lot of RAM or fast RAM? Faster RAM is more expensive so I can't have as much as cheaper slower RAM. Which is better?

As much ram as you can get.

The speed will not be the limiting factor but running out of memory sure will be!
 
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