Steve is referring to the physical transfer speed of the hard drives themselves. Currently, the fastest hard drives can barely top 150 MB/s in sequential transfer speed (or put it this way, the fastest SATA hard drives can barely max out even a 1.5 Gbps SATA I interface).

"6Gb" refers only to the interface speed, not the actual speed of the hard drive. For example, the Samsung F3 1TB drive uses the Sata 3Gb interface but is faster than the WD Caviar Black 1TB 6Gb drive. At the moment, 6Gb is only a marketing gimmick designed to sell 'newer' 6gb drives and sata controllers. There are many reviews all over the web testing 6Gb drives on both Sata 6Gb and Sata 3Gb connections and every drive is the same speed on both.

Which goes back to the actual physical sequential speed of the hard drive being the limiting factor (as I implied in my post above).

Steve, just look at the PPBM4 results and you will see that the Phenom II X4 955 comes out around 95 seconds. Assume the X6 is 50% faster in the best case, and the results will still be over 65 seconds.

In the other test look at the HP 9400 results. See where I get these rough estimates.

Remember also that AnandTech and TomsHardware are not very reliable test sites to consult for video editing.

The AMD's all suffer from their limited SSE support, which is what is used extensively during encoding to MPEG and H.264 and that is the reason AMD will always be way behind Intel on these typical video oriented tasks.

SSE4 subsets

Intel SSE4 consists of 54 instructions. A subset consisting of 47 instructions, referred to as SSE4.1 in some Intel documentation, is available in Penryn. Additionally, SSE4.2, a second subset consisting of the 7 remaining instructions, is first available in Nehalem-based Core i7. Intel credits feedback from developers as playing an important role in the development of the instruction set.

AMD currently only supports 4 instructions from the SSE4 instruction set, but have also added two new SSE instructions that is named SSE4a. These instructions are not found in Intel's processors supporting SSE4.1 and alternatively AMD processors aren't supporting Intel's SSE4.1. Support was added for SSE4a for unaligned SSE load-operation instructions (which formerly required 16-byte alignment).[3]

What is the best video card, in the range of 90-140 dollars, that is recommended with the i7 930 and 12 gigs of 1600 ram?

Natan, the 9800GT 1GB ($90-100) w/ 112 coreswhich I tested with the 'patch' is a good ecnonomical choice. I ran a test on my i7 920 at stock 2.66GHz using 3 AVCHD layers (60i from Sony xr500v) with the same 8 MPE-accelerated effects on each layer. I exported a 60s clip, and the 9800GT took about 14 mins while a GTX 275 (240 cores/$220) took under 9 mins. If you want a little more info, find my thread from a month ago where I include this info.

Harm, I have seen your disdain for tomshardware in prior posts, but I have not seen any good evidence proving that their testing is flawed and unreliable. I have come across many sites with flawed testing, but tom's is not one of them. Maybe they weren't very reliable in the past, but over the course of the last 2-3 years, I have found most of their testing to be very reliable, which encompasses CPU and HDD testing. I don't game so I don't pay too much attention to the GPU testing except when they test workstation cards.

Furthermore, I have been searching for a good site that tests various hardware aimed at video editing, but have not found one that does more than a few tests here and there. At the moment, the only one I do like is digitalcontentproducer.com (aka millimeter). They have done a fair amount of testing with the Mac Pro and the last 3 generations of HP workstations, including the Z800 with dual-hexacore. For the HP workstations, they have always used Premiere Pro, and one of their best tests showed how much 8-16GB+ of ram helps with Premiere CS4.

Harm, maybe you can talk to Chris about writing up articles that review computer hardware aimed at video editing. If you needed any assistance, I would be glad to help, such as showing what my computer can do compared to others. Thus, people can make an informed decision on what hardware they need. I have many ideas on testing if you are interested.

I'd put these two together and discovered that neither Anand nor Tom's used the Adobe suites at all. In fact, they might have used older versions of the video editing and encoding software that does not take anywhere near full advantage of even SSE3, let alone SSE4.