If you are on a PC, I’d recommend an Intel i7 Processor. I have the i7 920, which comes at a pretty reasonable price (you can get the processor for $200 and a good rig with it for $850 on up – mine was about $1300).

Playback is smooth (unless I add a ton of effects, which is to be expected).

-Brian

Do you have any recommendations on what processors are a ‘minimum’ requirement in order to do video editing without going mad? or is it more a function of Video, Memory or all three? I always find myself stuck with getting a computer that has all the features but that ONE that is missing that slows everything down. Also, what would be the minimum budget of a decent video editing machine? Thanks for the help (maybe your readers can pipe in as well)

Thanks

[DR – Hi Greg, there are minimum system requirements that are posted on the Adobe website but let me comment a little further here. Video editing is one of those few areas like PC gaming where more is always better.

In general, I like to recommend the processor second from the top because it presents the best value/performance combination.

GPU is becoming increasingly important but of the three: CPU, GPU and memory, GPu is currently last. That said, it’s still VERY important and I don’t recommend a bargain basement card.

Memory is the single cheapest thing you can do to improve your performance on CS4 today – especially if you have a 64bit Vista install. See my entries on Vista 64… When purchasing memory, I recommend buying the expensive stuff because a bad memory sector is almost always the trickiest thing to diagnose. The problems make it look like Adobe makes bad software when in fact, it’s cheap memory that makes the whole system perform poorly.

So, RAM, CPU and GPU are all important.