Am I over-speccing?

[hut49]

I need a home pc that is predominantly going to be used for video editing, DVD burning, Photoshop plus general office applications. I want to be able to have multiple applications running without compromise. I don't want to be feeling the walls closing in in 12 months time on performance or storage, or be looking for a major system upgrade for 3 years. I'm not into gaming on the pc.

Currently I've spec'd the following:

Processor: Pentium D 830

Memory: 2x1024 DDR2 533MHz

250GB SATA hard drive (I don't plan on storing a lot of video on the system - I know this takes about 13GB per hour of video). I figure that if I need more then I can add a NAS and use this to wirelessly serve a Squeezebox or two that I'm thinking about getting in the New Year.

256MB ATI Radeon X600 graphics card

IEEE 1394 PCI video editing card

Plus all the other gubbings...

What does the Panel think?

[FourWheelDrift]

If the price is right you can never have too much of anything.

[GreenV8S]

Buying at the bleeding edge and then keeping it forever is a very expensive approach and your system will soon be obsolete. In the long term it is better to go for a reasonably fast machine with plenty of RAM and then plan to replace it from time to time.

[Plotloss]

You can never be too rich, too thin or have too much throughput.

[ErnestM]

It's not just the storage of video, but the rendering of it that you need to worry about. Also, if you hook up two SATA drives as RAID 0, you can get better rendering.

1 final hint on the drives - if you are planning on doing video editing, you want SATA II (300) drives. The difference is noticible.

I think your processor is a very good choice. You might find some marginal improvement with the Extreme, but you will double your processor budget (cash budget - no computing budget)...

ErnestM