Thinkpads Forum

I'm thinking of building a desktop for mainly video editing.
i already have a T61, and its more than adequate, but i want a beastly machine.

i was wondering which aspect(s) are most important for editing videos. processor speed? video card?


If video card is not that important, i was thinking something like
quad core and 5+ gigs of ram with a 10k rpm harddrive. the ram might seem like overkill, but i run vmware with 2+ virtual machines at a time.

For editing video - CPU is much more important than GPU (video card). The GPU's contribution is critical when rendering 3D graphics, but not when editing the 2D video.

i should mention that it will all be HD video.

One trick that's done is to get two drives, then use one as a source and the other as the destination for data. Reason being that hard drives do not perform very well doing two things at once.

Max out the system with RAM....memory is so cheap these days, easy upgrade that gives awesome bang for the buck.

Agreed about running a pair (or more) of hard drives. Not partitions..but physically separate hard drives. Also move the pagefile.sys (virtual memory) of your OS to the second hard drive (3rd if possible..even just getting a 3rd older smaller drive just for the pagefile). Keep your editing softwares "workspace" on the second drive also.

While a high end GPU isn't important, still get a decent one with 128 or 256 megs of RAM, middle models are so cheap these days. For under 100 bucks you can get some good ones. Seek DVI out connection to, so it will work well with the larger higher resolution monitor you will want.

Low system impact antivirus software that won't bog down your PC. Enter your favorite video editing softwares "workspace" directories in the real time protection exclusion list.