dono if this thread should be here or hardware, maybe both? lol

So my dad wants to buy a new video editing rig (his is 7 years old!!). i'm pretty tech savvy and keep up to date with the latest, but this is one category i never really go in to since i don't do any editing myself. my impression was that video editing was an entirely separate category and required "special" hardware to do all the complicated tasks

my dad is set on getting a new Matrox card but my real concern is all of the Nvidia's CUDA, AMD's new stream processor and gpgpu stuff going around where programs like photoshop are using the graphics card to help in calculations. still worth the 1.5k for a matrox card?

also
1) big difference in performance between dual and quad core? (i imagine so since there is for transcoding my movies and music)
2) difference between 4GB vs 8GB of memory in performance?
3) any brand that's famous for quality? or any specific mobo i'd want to get?
4) should i wait for Nehalem?

he'll need it around october so unless there's a reason for waiting till then to buy a new machine (....) i was just going to order parts off newegg and build it myself once i get a few opinions

thanks for readin

matrox makes GREAT cards. I would hands down recommend them, especially if he wants to use dual or triple monitors, which most video and sounds editors do.

1) For this kind of work, definitely go quad core, it'll end up saving a bunch of time.
2) Huge, go for as much ram as you can possibly afford.
3) Honestly, for this type of work any quality motherboard with the features wanted/needed will work just fine.
4) Not sure, IMHO it's too early to tell how reliable windows will be with it. That's really the big hurdle for Nehelem is how windows will handle it. It's a huge leap in how things are handled and I'm willing to bet at first windows will be unstable, but who knows? The chips will definitely be faster and we should see 8 core processors...

I can't agree more with MR_Candyman.

I don't do video editing myself, but I do alot of audio editing/production and I can tell you that 4GB of ram gets eaten up pretty quickly when just doing AUDIO so as Candyman said, as much as you can afford - Maybe get 12/16GB of high speed DDR2 instead of 4/8GB of DDR3 as the price will be a nice difference. (unless you have the money to spend)

Also (this is not a fanboy comment) but stay with XP for a while. I couldn't be certain with video editing but I know there is still a decent amount of campatibility issues with alot of audio software/plugins. I think the hardware ones have been sorted out though.

good point abut the vista issues...some of my audio software is "compatible" with vista, but the latency is much higher doing the audio work, and that causes big issues. Haven't experienced any problems with video editors yet, but it might be an issue.

and of course look at apple power macs as well this has been apples forte for some time now