CPU for a video editing machine

[Gadish]

Hi,

I'm looking to build a machine that will serve mainly for working with video (using Pinnacle Studio 10). Now please correct me if I'm wrong, but the processing when editing videos is done by the processor and not by the graphics card. I'm basing this whole thread on this notion, so if I'm mistaken please let me know :)

So the main Issue is the Processor of course. I've been out of the game for a few years now, I have no idea whether I should go for an AMD or Intel processor. And it's not just that, the are so many CPUs out there with different clocks speeds, different memory size, number of cores etc.. I really don't know where to begin. What more important for video editing? Higher clock speed, bigger cache memory on the CPU? I'd really appreciate some words of advice here as I'm totally lost here...

Thanks!

[mjc]

Video processing is both CPU and GPU intensive...so you need plenty of power in both. It isn't GPU intensive the same way a game is and a card designed for video processing is going to be better/higher performance than a gaming card. (Nvidia Quadro/Ati FirePro...a workstation card)

A large CPU cache is going to be helpful, too.

Now, as far as it goes, the number of cores is going to depend on whether or not your app supports multi-threading/multiple processors/cores. If it is single threaded, then 8 cores aren't any better than one.

[Gadish]

Thanks for replying mjc,

some guy on another forum suggested that what I'm doing is just graphical editing and not really Video editing and that i could do with a cheaper AMD processor.

What i do is get the movies from the DVcam to the PC, then chop them up, sequence them, add sound etc and compile the whole thing...

So, will Nvidia Quadro be useful for me? I'm talking about one of the low end Quadro cards as the expensive one are way out of my financial abilities

I can afford the ‏Core i7 920, s1366, 8MB or ‏Core i7 860, s1156, 8MB, with a good motherboard and 4GB of RAM. The question is, will those expensive processors give me significant improvement over the cheaper AMD versions for the kind of work I'm doing..?

What do you guys think?