A PC that makes editing faster and smoother

[TomJ]

I'm planning to buy an AVCHD camera soon, and will also need to buy a new computer for video editing. I'll probably go with a desktop PC. I am looking for any suggestions about good systems to get? Which characteristics will give me a substantial boost in performance, and which ones are only marginal? Fast quad-core CPU? 4-8-16 GB of RAM? 10,000RPM hard drive? A top-of-the-line graphics card?

I'm willing to spend more on parts that will really make editing faster and smoother, but don't want to spend more on those things that will only produce a smaller improvement. Most of my editing will involve cutting and re-ordering things and converting video from AVCDH to other formats (e.g., to regular DVD to share with friends and relatives, etc.)

Any suggestions? If you have recently purchased a computer for these purposes, what configuration did you get? Are there good systems from Dell/HP/etc., or do I need to build one on my own?

Thanks for the help!

[KristoferB]

To answer your last question first, I build all of my own, so that would be my recommendation there..

next it depends on what you are really doing.. is this entirely professional, or more of a hobby type thing, or maybe semi-professional..

with quad cores you have to remember that not every application can take advantage of a quad core.. but even so, I run one on my main setup, and love it...

but for video and photo editing, more ram is always better, so that would lead you to buy a 64bit operating system so it can fully utilize the ram, but then you may run into compatibility problems with your programs if they cannot run on 64bit, but Vista64 does a good job with 32bit applications and I haven't heard anything bad about it regarding running 32bit apps..