What do you mean, "kind of video editing"? You mean because his old PC was so slow that he wouldn't do anything large enough on his new PC to take advantage of it? He's obviously not doing "serious" video editing otherwise he would already have a better machine, but it's clear that he'd like to do more if his PC allowed him, and 4 cores is more suited than 2.

Regarding SLI...wouldn't you be future-proofing yourself much more so by getting a single high-end card vs going SLI now? You'd allow yourself the opportunity to add the second card down the road...if you run SLI immediately, you have to replace both cards to get any improvement.

I'm not going to get involved in the 2vs4 core debate as I myself can't make my mind up which is best at the moment,

As for XF/SLI, I don't see the logic in getting an XF/SLI system now, personally I'd buy the best single card I can now, which might not offer the "best" gaming performance vs an XF/SLI setup now, but in say 6 months, the price of getting the second card will have gone down no end and too be honest, apart from crysis, there is no other game I can think of at the moment that really stresses the top nvidia cards to below 30fps.

As a slight aside, can someone recommend a good resource for learning from scratch what I'd need to know to build my own PC?

http://www.corsairmemory.com/systembuild/report.aspx?report_id=12472

from 2005 but very good.

He said he's trying to get the best system he can now so he doesn't have to spend money down the road.

He also said:

But it's money he could save now. In the long run he'd spend the exact same amount of cash (or maybe less!) and have a better system overall.



I prefer not to make blatant assumptions as to his use of the PC. I was implying that he should tell us, not us make random guesses.

My point is, if he's going to be using stuff along the lines of Windows Movie Maker or Vegas Video, etc, he wouldn't benefit from multi-core CPUs anyway. And depending on how complex his editing is, he might not even benefit on Adobe Premiere (less complex timelines do better on faster CPUs vs more cores. Higher core count only really works when multiple filters and tracks come into play).

Yeah, but if he can't get an improvement out of an upgrade, why would he want to upgrade?


I agree, but I doubt he's going to take his extra cash and save it for another upgrade. If so, then there isn't any reason for SLI. But typically that's not the case.

What I want is to take my money and buy the best computer I can get right now. However, it would be nice if a couple years from now I could swap out the processor or the graphics card or whatever for something better. Basically I just don't want any tech that's going to be obsolete in the near future (i.e. when I got this computer, it was the last generation of video cards that used AGP, so I have not been able to upgrade that).

With that in mind, what components would you recommend?

DOES NOT COMPUTE

I still reccommend the same thing. Just me though *shrug*

Right now, getting a top video card is not necessarily a good idea.

The 9800GTX is a nice card, but only marginally better than the 8800GTX (and in some cases, worse. Crysis runs better on an 8800GTX than a 9800GTX. Go figure). However, rumour has it that nVidia has 9900 series cards coming out around June/July which will be a real upgrade from the 8 series.

SLi is probably not worth the hassle. It still doesn't give a decent performance boost in all games, my major gripe with it is that you cannot run dual monitors and SLi (though you can turn off sli when you're not using it) but I enjoy having a game open on one screen and being able to read something else on the other, get email notifications, see who's coming on messenger, etc, I don't know whether anyone else is like this.


Oh and it's not worth going ATI/AMD at the moment.

Preliminary list of parts:

Core 2 Quad Q9300
Asus P5N-T Deluxe
2x 2GB Corsair DDR2 RAM
GeForce 9800GX

You mean GX2 or GTX?