I went with a 10K rpm System Drive and twin 250GB SATA 7200 in RAID0 for video. I threw in an extra 250GB SATA for a scratch disk. It is hard to tell just how much faster the system drive is, but I believe I will be happy that I spent the extra few dollars.

What worked for me
 

If you can upgrade the MB you can get a great results from a simple upgrade with a new Core Duo CPU. I bought at Fry's a core duo MB+CPU for just $170. It was the entry level E6300 but the results are phenomenal. THe board is using VIA chip set. I picked them intentionally for the price but also because they support DDR so I didn't have to buy new memory (I do have 2G too). So with $170 I gave to my flimsy PC a new lease on life. I do have also a 4P Opteron but it is too hot and noisy.
A second option could be to buy the MainConcept HDV module for Premiere. It is really cool because it has "smart-rendering". What it does is to recognize all these parts were you don't put effects of any sort and it bypass them avoiding unnecessary rendering. It is good for the quality too since these parts will not be recompressed. You then get back HDV material with all the rendered parts. Consider this, if you edit 10% of your movie (cuts don't count) you have an incredible increase in speed vs. conventional methods. THis and the previous mods can give you a huge advantage over your current configuration.
I don't know why nobody talks about this mainconcept module. It is really fantastic.
http://www.mainconcept.com/site/index.php?id=7862

I blew the budget and went with the 6800, the Extreme Edition at 2.93GHz and 4GB of fast RAM. I use Aspect HD because it makes editing much easier than editing native MPEG. And while MainConcept did a good job, Cineform Aspect HD makes it possible to work with HDV in After Effects.

Of course, the fact that everything is blindingly fast just encourages me to do more, which means color correction and too many minor other corrections, which means everything takes forever again. But it all looks better.

WOW!!! That is a SWEEEET HDV editing studio imo!

hey!
 

I was just providing the best system he could reasonably build, not necessarily the best bang for the buck :P I could have recommended a 15k RPM SCSI 320 Raid array but that would require about 5000 bucks.

Steven, make sure your hard drives are good because if not your system will bottleneck on them. Have at minimum a single 7200 RPM drive, 16 meg cache flavor with Native command queieng. If possible run your system partition different than your "Scratch disks".

Again, these are all recommendations to speed up and eliminate bottlenecks, not the absolute best bang for the buck.

I went with the 6400 cpu because according to www.tomshardware.com you can overclock them nicely on the stock fan.

Sorry, video was really my second hobby, computers was my first :(

jon

Jon,

I had some initial problems getting the drives set up properly, but after a little tweaking, I was able to get the best score ever on the Premiere Pro 2.0 benchmark for a single dual-core processor. I only lost to a couple of 2 Dual-core systems.

Having a 10,000 rpm system drive helps a little. Having RAID0 for video helps, and an extra drive for a scratch disk is helpful. I have all three.

The benchmark program points out the bottleneck. Rendering is almost all CPU, and exporting a new AVI is almost all disk drives. I was writing too slow. Unfortunately, I tweaked this and that and I didn\'t keep track, so I don\'t know what worked.

If anyone who uses Premiere Pro 1.5 or 2.0 wants to check out how their system compares to others, check this out: http://mysite.verizon.net/wgehrke/ppbm/