[originally posted in rec.video.desktop, but after reading
uk.rec.rec.video.digitals description it seems more appropiate here]

Im helping my father setup a computer, which most demanding tasks would be
video editing in Pinnacle Studio 9 and MPEG2 encoding in general.
I dont know that much about video editing, so i thought id ask for some tips
here.

As for the CPU/mobo, im tied between a P4 Prescott 540(3.2Ghz) w/ Abit AA8
DuraMax mboo and a AMD64(winchester core) 3200+ w/ A8N-SLI Deluxe
motherboard(its surprisingly cheap here in denmark, its costs less than most
standard nforce3Ultra based offerings). Im wondering a bit if buying a PCI
Express based system is overkill, but i hate buying stuff that wont be
easily upgraded later.

In both scenarios i plan for 2x512MB memory DDR/DDR2 and a X300SE, X300 or
X600Pro graphics card(there isnt much difference in price).

As for Intel vs. AMD, im aware that the Intel CPU is probably slightly
faster for video encoding, but its also slightly more expensive, and im
worried that special 64-bit versions of various video software might come
along and change all that in the near future. Besides this, i dont like that
the Prescott is known to run so hot. Feedback would be appreciated....

However, most important to figure out is the storage setup. My father will
need lots of space as just one of his many projects covers 18 or so miniDV
tapes(he will keep the miniDV tapes so storage reliability isnt that big a
deal). I was thinking 2x250GB SATA Hitachi 2K750 in RAID0(both mobo's above
offer RAID). Unfortunately this doesnt really leave money to have a
dedicated system drive, which i know is a common recommendation for video
editing.
So i guess what im asking is which will be faster: a 36GB SATA Raptor as
system drive and a 250GB SATA HD as capture/editing drive or 2x250GB in
RAID0. Obviously im leaning towards the RAID as it will provide speedup in
general usage and not only in video-editing scenarios, as well as more space
in general. Of course ideally the system drive would be a Raptor RAID, but
thats just too expensive

One could probably save something by going with the AGP based VIA K8T800 Pro
chipset w/ RAID and a very cheap gfx card, in fact going this way might
save nearly enough for either a Raptor system drive OR an extra +1GB of RAM,
but would degrade general system performance a bit. Going with an nforce3
board with RAID wont save any cash to my surprise, its just as expensive as
the nforce4SLI.

Btw, please dont provide price advice, as i live in Denmark, so US/UK offers
are useless to me

Thanks alot.