Re: New system reccomendations - all opinions greatfully received

My first pick for an Athlon MB in the near future would be one using the KT133A chipset. This update to the KT133 chipset actually provides a 133 MHz DDR bus for the chip, in addition to PC133 support. Initial benchmarks show its performace to split the difference between the KT133 and a DDR system. An advantage is that it does this with normal PC133 SDRAM which is still quite a bit cheaper than good DDR SDRAM. Go for at least 256 MB.

If you unlock the multiplier on the Athon, you won't have to worry about getting a chip spec'ed for the 133 MHz bus. You can lower the multiplier and set the bus to 133 MHz without really overclocking the chip.

Video editing may utilize DDR quite well, but the DDR DIMMs and motherboards need some time to mature before I'd consider them above the KT133A. See lostcircuits.com for info.

Abit's KT7A-RAID will have a built-in High Point ATA100 RAID chip. Somebody will probably make a KT133A board with onboard Promise ATA100 RAID. I'd recommend a Promise FastTrack 100 PCI card to be sure the ATA RAID can be carried over to another motherboard.

Once certain convenience features are satisfied (like access to drive bays, pull-out mobo tray, etc), I think it's more important to choose a power supply than a case. Go for at least 300W. I have a PC Power & Cooling 300W ATX that powers my A7V/Duron @ 900, GeForce, 4 hard drives, CDROM and CDR drive.

I know squat about video editing. I know Matrox makes the Marvel based on the G400 and Asus has the V7100 based on the GeForce MX. I think LED could tell you a lot more, including info on dedicated video editing cards.

For the storage configuration I think the best way to do it would be to have 1 hard drive (with the OS and your programs) on the chipset's IDE controller. Then have your 2 RAID drives dedicated to storing your video data. BTW, the OS to use is probably Windows 2000.