Which video card?
 

Which video card will do for Premiere and AE?

Is i7core with 4000 series ATI GPU good enough?

How much of a difference does a Xenon with a Quadro make?

What are some good mid range FireGL or Quadro cards?

John,

As you read on another forum, the video card is the 'icing-on-the-cake'. It will help, but for most of the editing work the benefit of a top-notch video card over a more standard card will be minor, but the price difference may be a tenfold of the more consumer oriented card.

The Quadro CX at around $ 1.5K is IMO not worth the money, unless you only encode to H.264 all day. You are generally better served with investing that kind of money in a faster CPU, more memory and a better disk setup and get any recent 512 MB+ video card from the ATI HD48xx or nVidia 28x or higher.

If you look at this list PassMark Software - PerformanceTest System Benchmarks - Fastest Performing PCs you will see that a large number of the top scores were made with either ATI 4870 or nVidia 295 cards.

The fact that Quadro's are notibly absent from this list may mean that they are overpriced in comparison to more affordable models. If money is no object they may be the best you can get for 3D work, but for general editing I don't think it will pay off.

Personally I use a ATI HD4870/512 MB card, overclocked to 800 MHz GPU and 1020 MHz memory and have no problems whatsoever.