Help deciding upgrade

[akpanda]

I am having intel 845 MB with P4 2.4GHZ CPU, 512 MB DR 266 RAM and ATI Radeon 9500 PRO 128 MB Graphics card. I have tried video editing with this setup (using pinnacle 8 / Adobe premiere pro) but finding rendering takes lot of time and even the final quality is not up to mark.

I am thinking of upgrading my system. Should I go for a new MB with DDR 400 support. As I am having a decent 8x AGP card will you please help me in deciding the best value for money upgrade. Is it worth to continue with present graphics card or should I go for a total new system with PCI Express card.

Thank you in advance

 

[Bobcat1132]

personally i would go with a better graphics card first due to the fact that video editing is one of the most graphic intensive things you can do and all though your card is 8x agp and works good it really doesnt have the hardware features that you would need to do major video editing however faster ram and a faster processor would also help if you a very serious about it. a lady who lives right above me who does video editing for a living has a dual xeon processor chip running at 3.4 ghz with 3 gig of ram and her computer still gets lagged down every now and then. good luck

 

[Didou]

Video editing is entirely done by the CPU, not the VGA card. That's like thinking a PCI-e card will make plug-ins go faster in Photoshop, it won't.

Get a better CPU/MB combo, probably one with HyperThreading or wait for Dual-Cores to come out sometime at the end of this year. If you can afford it & you're serious about video-editing, a dual-CPU system is highly recommended.

 

[akpanda]

Which is a better CPU for video editing INTEL or ATHLON 64. Further how much RAM gives value for money? Is 1 GB quite enough?

 

[Didou]

As of right now it would have to be the Pentium 4. Once dual-cores are out, the Athlon64-X2 scales better when you add a second core & encodes faster then a dual-core Pentium-D.

1GB should be sufficient (2 DIMMS of 512mb). If you feel your memory is constantly full while encoding, get 2 more 512mb modules.

 

[Liquidlen]

Cart before the horse!
Why not give us an idea as to where your budjet range is ?

 

[zephead]

the i845 chipset, which you have currently in operation, is old and delivers lackluster performance. go for i865 or higher when making your new purchase.