Hey guys, so I am building a editing computer. So I am going with a quad Core processor about 4GB RAM, but will I need a good graphics card too or can I just go with a pretty good basic one? Do graphics cards play much of a factor in an editing computer.

Another quick question. When installing a new processor is it as easy as putting my bios back to default, installing the new processor, and restarting computer?

Editing video? Editing photos? Editing audio?

Please be more specific; include your budget, and all other possible uses of this computer.

Video card is not that important as most programs only display a 2-d image. Although some 3-d modeling programs are helped by specific video cards.

You need to visit your mobo's webpage and see what processors it supports.

This editing computer would be for videos and that is it. We do a lot of editing for a small TV series. My budget would probably be about $3000, but would not want to go that high and I know I could. Any suggestions on a good mobo and good fast ram? I dont need SLI, or WiFi options either.

I am going to go with the fastest Quad Core and probably about 8GB of the fastest RAM. Any ideas?

The more ram couldn't hurt... and prices are pretty decent right now as far as DDR2 ram goes. You'd have to have a 64 bit operating system to take advantage of more then ~ 3.2 gig, though. Even if your OS is equiped with 64 bit computing, I'm not sure you'd see any benifit unless your program were designed to run in a 64 bit mode. I suppose you could argue about system resources, but I'm not convinced that it would do you much good without a program (your editing software) that runs in 64 bit. What program you runnin'?

I remember seeing Photoshop cs4 was going to be 64 bit for windows and not mac. I'd imagine Adobe Premier wouldn't be far behind if not included with the cs4 release but that is pure speculation.

as far as the processor goes, yes - you want the fastest quad in your budget that supports SSE 4.1 instruction set as it will provide up to 20% improvement per clock cycle over processors that don't support it.

any cheap video card should work as long as it has dual dvi out. ANY of the video editing software aps i've used are much easier to use with dual monitors. (Well --- I've heard that the pro's still us CRT monitors as they provide a better color palette so just make sure you match your video card to the monitors you will be using)

Id go with either an EVGA 9600GT, 8800GTS 512mb or an ATI 3870. They are the sweet spot in performance vs price. 180.00 ~ 250.00 range.

If you have more in your budget then go for it but those are as low as I would go IMO.

PNY makes "Professional Video Edition" versions of the nVidia Quadro graphics card which come with breakout boxes and other wonderful things.

You should also look at Matrox for video capture cards.