I would like to add a hardware suggestion for those building a new workstation or who would like to lower the number of drives their data is spread across.

Samsung has come out with their new 1TB Spinpoint internal HD. Tom's Hardware tests show it to run extremely cool and while access times are average, transfer rates smoke and are close to a raptor. Excellent purchase for those of us needing lots of storage space. I have ordered one and if I like it will order another for backup for my backup. Two of these babies will replace four 500MB drives and will certainly simplify life, even if only temporarily.

If you need faster access times, the Barracuda equivalent of this drive would be a better choice.

I just noticed that the quad-core I bought for $650 after mail-in-rebate is now being offered for $600 after mail-in-rebate from Office Depot! I've been using it for a month now, and it seems to be a very capable system - particularly the Q6600 for quick renders on Vegas.

I paid under $2k for mine only months ago and thought I was getting a great deal!

Hey all

I just did alot of research for a new system. Value/performance being the object. here is what I came up with...

Run the Q6600 ($275) with Corsair XMS 800 memory.
Get a GA-P35C-DS3R gigabyte motherboard and overclock the processor from 2.4 to 3.0 ghz. Very easy and no heat issues even with the stock processor fan. Perfectly stable (see tomshardware.com for more info.)

Get an inexpensive nvidia card like 8800GT (if i recall.)

Use a good power supply. 650W

Once you get everything snapped together run the torture test in a program called prime95 but download the new beta version that will test all 4 processors on a quad core at the same time. Run it overnight. Temps of the processor should max at 65 celcius.

-Jonathan

Overclocking is nice, but not always reliable for rendering in my limited experience with overclocking, heat issues aside.

I'm NOT knocking overclocking or saying it wont work for rendering, just be careful not to invest in a Build Your Own and to expect overclocking to make it worth the extra work only to find out it doesn't work out. I must admit I was not an experienced overclocker when I overclocked my Pentium D, and while it worked at lower settings, I couldn't finish a render at the highest speeds, and the overclocked speeds that did work made so little difference it didn't matter.

I have found V8 buggy, and can't even imagine running it overclocked though if I had the ability I sure would try! My MOBO won't do it (Dell OEM).

I'm with you which is why I suggested a very conservative overclock. The same type of overclock that I've been running on my AMD dual core X2 for the last year and a half. Tomshardware overclocked the Q6600 to 3.3Ghz from 2.4. I'm suggesting 3.0Ghz as it requires almost no voltage increase to the chip and keeps heat issues well under control. The speed however is night and day. Of course you could spend twice as much for the next chip up and still run at lower speeds.

The article is here and I'm running the same setup as they do in the article: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/08/dual_vs_quad/

Other thing of note is that they recommend the quad over the dual for the money.

Last point is this. If you run the Prime95 torture test against your computer it will max out all the cores at 100% for the time period you specify. Vegas will most likely not run all 4 cores at 100% for 24 hours and will certainly not put the pressure that Prime95 does on your system memory and cpu. The program will fail if you have the least problem and you will know to throttle back. Whe overclocking is done right it's really nothing to be scared of.

I'm not a gamer but I can think of no more valid reason to overclock than video editing. The article above shows how the Intel Q6600 does when run at 2.4ghz vs 3.0ghz vs 3.2ghz vs. 3.3ghz when running video rendering applications. Not vegas but you will get a feel for the increases. For example in one of their video encoding test it took 2min9sec to encode a short piece of video at the standard 2.4ghz. Overclocked to 3ghz (from 2.4) it took 1min49sec. That's a difference of 20 seconds and over the corse of a long encode that will make a huge difference.