Hi all,

I'm wanting to purchase a CPU / motherboard combination in order to do video editing with Adobe Premiere 6.5 and am completely swamped with information overload from trolling through web sites.

I have kind of narrowed it down to 3 possible candidates and was wondering if anyone has any feedback on which candidate would be best; or whether all the candidates are rubbish and there's something else that would be better. So without further ado, here are the 3 candidates:

1. 1 * Intel P4 2.8 GHz on an Asus P4T533 (Intel 850E)
2. 1 * AMD Athlon XP 2.8GHz on an Asus A7N8X Deluxe
3. 2 * AMD Athlon 2400 on an Asus A7M266-D dual CPU board

Any suggestions on this would be really helpful

thanks a lot

Pancho

An Amiga 4000 with a Video Toaster video card! hehe

Other things are important for the systems you are looking for, the choices you have made are fine. It depends if you are doing analog video capture or digital video. Large and fast hardrives are important. A good video capture card is very important.
Lots of ram is needed also. Check out this link<A HREF="http://digitalvideoediting.com" target="_new">Video Editing</A> for more information.

the Prisoner

I'm not a number, I'm a free man!

Fast fast fast!

I would go with a P4 with HT since Premiere benefits from it.

Really? And what version of Premiere would that be?

I would guess any recent version, but at least 6 or 6.5 -- wouldn't you think? I just think it would be silly to buy a P4 chip at this point and not go with HT.

Here are some links:

http://www.intel.com/english/home/ [...] are/video/

http://www.pcworld.com/news/articl [...] 898,00.asp

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/2 [...] ng-02.html

That's great, coz I've never thought of my Premiere 6.5 can take advantage of HT technology. I know it does support dual processor though. Anyway, thanks for the info.

A hyper-threading processor-based machine is treated by applications as though it were a dual-processor machine.

To answer the orginal question, the best combination is definitely Intel, not AMD. I have nothing against them, in fact they are better value for money in most events (and i build more AMD machines than Intel ones), but for video editing get Intel. My advice therefore, based on current market prices, is this:

An intel 875 ("Canterwood" ) type motherboard, or the newer 865 ("springdale" ) ones will be a bit cheaper.
A Pentium 4 2.4C. This is the cheapest new CPU that has hyperthreading, and it looks like bang for buck is going to rock the house down.
A pair of DDR400 memory sticks.

At this moment in time i am running (as of the start of this week) an MSI 865PE - based motherboard, with a 1.6A ("Northwood" ) processor in and a single 512MB DDR333 stick in. It works very nicely, and i will upgrade the CPU and memory when i can afford to.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=18108" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=18108</A>

I also am looking to build an 875 based system with 2.4C -- when prices come down a bit. It looks like the 2.4C can overclock to 3.0+ very easily. They will be a great deal!

Maybe it is the same chip just clocked lower for price purposes?