Looking for PC suggestions $500-$800

[Loyal Rogue]

[I'm a little too late. But, my 10 cents.]

Is that inflation or are you a member of the ditch the penny club?

You can do that work. It's just a matter of how long the machine takes to process changes, etc. So, it depends on the nature of the videos you'll be working with, how much you'll really use it for that, how patient you are, etc. It doesn't sound like something you're trying to do as a career. So, you're probably more willing to wait for longer process times than someone who has to do that on a daily basis.

Actually, the reason I want to start playing more with video is so that I can eventually add it to the menu of services that we offer, but until I have a little experience under my belt I'm going to do my playing on a budget rig.
Hopefully I won't have too many mornings waking up to find the processing errored out at 80%...

If all goes well, I figure I can upgrade this box to an i7-870 for an extra $120 and add an nvidia GTX470 for $200-300 to cut down on the process time and still be way under budget for a proper NLE rig.

Speaking of upgrading, the Crucial RAM didn't work out.
I couldn't figure out why it would boot with 3 sticks but not with 4.
I thought I might have a bad memory slot, but it ended up that my 2 identical bargain Crucial sticks had a slightly different rev number at the end so they were no good for dual channel.
Of course they were all sold out by the time I went back to the store to exchange so I ended up finding a nice deal on an 8GB kit (2x4GB) of PNY Optima for $65 after rebate from Newegg instead.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820178333

[FlashLackey]

Got it. I think the i7 and 8+GB ram would be pretty good. The graphics card will just improve your display. It won't speed up processing the video files. Unless you're also going to get into 3D work, etc. you probably don't need all that great of a card, except maybe to push two large DVI monitors or something.

You will probably need an additional, large hard drive. The pieces of video and temp space needed for processing can be large and add up.