While this is true, I kept noticing that applications that I wanted to use only supported the NVidia card on PC. So I went that way on both the laptop and desktop. It's funny that I seem to experience very few of the issues that seem to plague other users. I have Quadro cards installed. Expensive, but worth it in my view.

First of all, I don't use Vegas, but Adobe CS4 MC, so that is a significant difference.

Adobe recently had some problems with nVidia cards, but that was not the reason of my preference for ATI. The reason is purely 'bang-for-the-buck' based.

The reason I'm not fond of nVidia Quadro cards is that the drivers claim almost exclusive rights to the PCI-e bus, thereby drastically slowing down disk performance when using a PCI-e raid controller. When that happens, all the performance gains from a high-end card disappear when the I/O system is slowed down to a crawl. The marginal advantage of Quadro cards in NLE (not talking about 3D applications) in comparison to the more affordable GTX or ATI cards do not warrant the price difference IMO.

In gamers land the video card is much touted and even SLI with 2, 3, or even 4 cards are popular. In NLE land this is a plain waste of money with current software.

Alright so far my machine comes to a total of $1003.44 with shipping.

Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS Hard Drive - 1TB, 32MB, SATA-300

BIOSTAR TPOWER X58A LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard (open box from newegg.. Think I can trust that? Its considerably cheaper this rout..)

OCZ DDR3 PC3-14400 Platinum Series Low-Voltage Triple Channel (6GB)

LG W2253TQ-PF 22" Widescreen LCD Monitor - 1080p, 1920x1080, 50000:1, 2ms, 16:9, DVI, VGA

i7 920

Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLFS 150GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb

Bluray burner will hold for now.

I now have to get Sony Vegas which = $600. Know anyway I can get it cheaper..like for free on a burnt disc or from a university?

Again, thanks everyone for your help. I really appreciate it.
Terry.

Well, being able to support cutting RED was a need I had. Until Vegas 9.0, the only way to do that was with RedCine. Redcine did not support ATI on the PC at all. Zero. So for me it was a practical choice of buying a card that my application supported, or trying to save a few bucks.

You're going to find that people typically take a very dim view on this kind of thing here. While we may have our issues with companies that make NLEs, we know that our dollars go to support these companies, and we rely on them heavily for support. Getting hacked versions does nothing to help them, or us. And many of us will not offer any assistance to users who have hacked versions. I know I won't and have seen other professionals do the same.

Some universities offer programs to their students for free. The tuition pays for the program. My university only has Final Cut Xpress.

I understand your point. I didn't mean getting a ripped version, just something that I didn't have to go into debt over. Like some people share computer games I just don't know anyone who has Vegas. I'll just buy it.

If you are a student, Vegas, Avid, Premiere, all have student versions. You might look into that.

will I be disadvantaged by a student version in anyway?

Depends on the application. In Vegas... no. In Avid, yes.

Hey Terry, sorry to jump back in so late, but in regard to the system HDD, Harm put it better than I did... even if there's not a lot on your system drive, there's a lot of activity going on during the editing, so while size isn't critical, I think speed is. Looks like the choice you made is a good one.

Although in other threads Harm has warned against Green drives. I assume this may have something to do with spin-down during power-saving operations, possibly making the drive too slow to respond when needed.

Caviar Green is a bad choice for an editing system, too slow because of the 5400 RPM. Change that to a Caviar Black.

Ok I will change to the black.

About the Mother board, its "open box" should I trust that or pay the extra $50 bucks to get one from tigerdirect?

It's subjective, how fast you need it to encoding and the type of work but for simple editing the answer is yes even for HD. You could add 2gb ram if the mobo allows, 32bit operating sys can only use 3.5gb.

two 1tb 7200rpm drives are sufficient, no raids needed.

I use single 19 Samsung, larger monitors are nice but if you're trying to save money two smaller monitors give more real estate for the buck. What is large enough is also subjective, number of ppl here edit on laptops.

I think you made a mistake trying to save money by getting a used computer, for a little extra you could have gotten a new entry level multicore computer. But thats water under the bridge, your system is sufficient for video editing so just move forward with what you have you can always upgrade later.