My HD Video Editor Shopping list: anything I should know?
 

I'm making a new PC just for editing AVCHD and uncompressed HD (Intensity). Here's my shopping list so far:

1. Quad-core intel 3Ghz
2. 4 GB ram
3. Sata 160GB boot drive
4. Sata 4 disk RAID 2TB
5. nVidia 8800GT (CUDA)

Windows 7 64bit
Premiere CS4 (CUDA acceleration)

Question:
a. How stable is CS4 in Win7?
b. Is CUDA (or other GPU acceleration) all its cracked up to be? I'm aiming for realtime transcoding...
c. Do systems with discrete audio and video cards work better than motherboards with intergrated?
d. Are there brands of boards and cards to avoid? I'm eyeballing a Gigabyte mobo, and their 8800GT. For sound: m-audio or SoundBlaster...

This isn't even going to be close.

Drives are good.

RAM - not close
CPU - buy the fastest i7 you can find, over clock it, and you may have a prayer.
Graphics Card - Probably not going to get you there. Maybe with a quadro.

Your questions:

A. No idea

B. Is CUDA all it's cracked up to be? Can be with the right card and an application that really uses it. Very few do. Especially not NLEs.

C. Yes.

D. Go look at what Avid certify for systems running their editing system. That's will give you an excellent idea of what you should be putting in this system. But take note that Avid is not yet certified on Win7, though several people are running in on Win7. I ran a trial on Win7 64 and it was bulletproof.

Perhaps Adobe has some guidelines on hardware. I know they do for CS5. In fact, THAT is what you should be building. Go find the requirements for the CS5 Mercury Playback engine, and build a system to match those specs. That will put you well on your way.

Your PC will be weak for editing both AVCHD and uncompressed HD. Go for an i7 and 12GB of RAM. There is no point in going for a 64-bit system using 4GB of RAM... that much can be handled by XP...

CS4 seems stable on W7 although I have not put it to real hard work yet.