Hi Grob - Yes, I'm aware of pcnirvana and Earl Foote (from the COW site) and looked at his systems, and I might eventually buy from them. Before I do, however, I want to hear what others use as a mid-price configuration, especially someone who build their system recently. I'd especially like advice about which motherboard and/or chipset to use.

BTW - Before I posted yesterday, I went to pcnirvana and used their "build your own" forms input, but it wasn't to my liking (it didn't have all the options I wanted). So, if I did buy from pcnirvana, I would need to e-mail Earl with my specifications, which was the reason for my original post.

this is what i recommend
Pentium 4- 2.4B CPU with 533Mhz FSB
Asus P4G8X Motherboard with Gigabit LAN, Serial ATA, and Firewire
1024MB Crucial Technologies PC-2100 DDR-SDRAM(2X512)
Matrox G-550 Dual Head Graphics Card
Maxtor 80GB ATA-133 7200RPM System(6Y060L0)
Maxtor 160GB SATA 7200RPM Audio/Video(6Y160M0)
pioneer A05 dvd wirter or Sony DRU500A
Teac Floppy Disk Drive
Zalman 400w psu
for your soundcard, depending on the how many in/outs, low latency, asio driver?
the m-audio delta audiophile 2496 is a good started. if u want to set up surround, take a look at the delta 66. www.m-audio.com

my rock solid system
P4 2.0A
Asus P4b533 mobo
Samsung 1024 pc2100 ddr ram
Matrox G550 dualhead
Seagate cuda 40g hd(dual boot xp) 80g(audio and video files)
Ibm 60g hd external mounted(via 1394/usb2)
Echo Gina 24 audio interface
Adapter firewire card
Nec 1530v and 1560v 15" lcd
LG dvd rom
Pioneer A05 dvd writer
Zalman 300w quiet PSU
XP pro SP1

Question # 1. for you to answer is, What kind of platform, AMD or Intel, am I going to go with ?Currently Intel has more going for it than AMD, because it's fastest cpu's w/hyperthreading reduce encoding time over comparable speed AMD rivals by about 30%. The bad part is Intel 3.0+gb cpu's are pricey, about $600 for the cpu + $200-300 for the motherboard + ram. So just for the guts it'll cost you about $1000. On the other hand you can go with an AMD XP2100 Throughbred B cpu on a quality Abit,Epox, Asus, motherboard. These chips all overclock to 2.2-2.4 gb, and run as fast as the fastest P4's in everything but encoding, and the cpu + motherboard will only cost about $200-250. With all due respects to DSE, current VIA chipsets dont have any current problems that I'm aware of.On the contrary, they are very fast, maybe edged out a bit by the new G-Force chipsets. Via had trouble when they first released this chipset over a year ago, (2 yrs. ?), but they've all been solved. If Spot has any info on lingering problems, I'd be interested in hearing them. A better question might be-how much do you want to spend on the CPU/Motherboard combo ? Answer that and forum members can make better informed suggestions..

The thing about equipment, is always buy the cheapest thing that will work with the software. In that respect, Vegas is awesome, working with practically anything reasonably modern.
It only bogs down in the speed of rendering effects, transitions, etc.
In that respect I'd suggest that you look further into the new Intel 3.2Gig HyperThreaded chip as the mainstay of your new computer.
Now the Sonic folks can confirm or deny this, but what I understand is that VV4 is optimized to take advantage of the new technology. Just what the speed gain will be... well I don't know. But if I were going to replace my system (and I am)... I'd wait for the prices to drop a little on this new chip and then go for it.
I've been looking around and found a (seemingly) great HP computer for sale now, on their site in the $1,600 to $1,800 range with all the goodies a Vegas user would need. As I remember, it had "the chip", 120Gig HD, 512Meg of RAM, and all the other goodies that you might or might not feel are necessary.
There are many people on this site who are far more qualified than I to comment on the technical aspects of which computer to buy, and I welcome their comments.
I'll be watching this thread.

This is just the type of discussion I wanted.

The reason I mentioned staying away from the VIA chipset is a post that stuck in my mind on the COW site about a year ago, where DSE and another of the "gurus" said something along the line of "they should put a banner on the COW forum saying stay away from VIA chipsets and make your life easire".

If DSE is reading this, I wonder if the newer VIA chipsets have changed his mind..??

Over at the pcnirvana site, his turnkey Vegas4 system uses:
-Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra 2 Motherboard
-Intel P4 2.53GHz 533FSB Processor
-PC2700 1024MB DDR RAM 333MHz

I'm going over to a site Billyboy had a link to (www.motherboards.org) to read more about these various motherboards.

Getting back to what I'd like to pay.....around $1000-1200 for the cpu, mb, ram, and 2 hard drives, then add another $300 for the Sony DVD500 and $100 for a video card.

I've been told the same concerning VIA chipsets. With AMD, you'd better go with the 760 or 762 chipsets but if you have choice, go with Intel. Concerning **sound**, this should be good advice if you want to stay away from "cracks" and "pops" and leave that for Rice Krispies...
And yes, I got a VIA (kt 133) chipset and yes, it cracks and pops...And I'm going with Intel for my next system.

Vegas IS optimized to use the 3.2Gig HyperThreading chip. Rendering speeds are excellent. At least compared to my older system which was a P4 1.7.

Def. the via is up to par now. I have had this dual ( 2 1gig intel processors) for about two years and it is a beast against a pent. 4 2.53 which I also have here.
Duals work very well with the video load from vegas.
DR

From my testing, I can't see that Vegas 4 is optimized for HT. In fact I am seeing slightly slower render times in V4 than I did in VV3. I have a dual Xeon 2.4 with HT turned on.

There is a thread two months old with different render times for the rendertest (vv3). Comparing speed with one render test, and with two at a time, with HT turned on and off.

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=160987

My cursory testings with V4 hold true to those tests except V4 is about 2-4 seconds slower than V3.

If V4 were optomized for HT, and I have 4 virtual processors, then there should be a significant jump between VV3 and V4 on the rendertest. I am just not seeing that. I only have to assume that V4 is NOT multithreaded, so how can it be optomized for HT??

Kirk

I have no idea who told you about VIA, but I have for 2 years and never encounter any problems.As for sound-I would put SB512 or Gold.
For video I will put the new ATI allinone($149).I have ATI 128pro and works great.
With long capture I get 1% drop frames.

The KT133 via boards are old boards. I've built half a dozen VIA boxes on KT333 boards , and everything was rock solid and no clicks and pops-(I recall hearing about this issue some long time ago, but it was caused by sound card/settings, etc, not the VIA chipset). The KT400 boards are the current standard, and they allow you to lock down your bus speeds and crank up your cpu speed as high as it'll go.I'm using all AMD myself, because of the cost- benefit ratio, but if I were going to spend $1000 on a box, instead of $250-$300, the P4 3.06 is the way to go. My XP2100 Tbred B machine running at 2.4ghz will do everything about as fast as the P4 3.06, except encoding-(rendering). Another user on this forum running a 3.06 P4 was able to encode a test clip. .avi to mpeg2 in 51 sec., as I recall. The same task took me about 90 seconds. So if you can live with this differential in encoding speed, you can go with AMD and save yourself a bundle of money. The savings is so great, in fact, that you could use it to build a second box dedicated to rendering only. Either way, your investment will be a dinosaur in a couple of years that you'll probably be passing along to your grandmother...

This discussion is well-timed for me. I'm thinking about building a second box for when my first one is locked up doing other stuff. I'm looking at an AMD system and an Asus mobo, but using an Nvidia chipset instead of a Via. The particular model is Asus A7N266-VM, a micro ATX config, fine for a backup PC, IMO (the only other non-Via mobo for an AMD Athlon is the Asus A7N8X). So if I go with an AMD Athlon XP2000+ chip, Asus A7N266-VM mobo, and 512 MB RAM with Kingston PC2100 memory, I'm set back all of $217. Pretty tempting. What I'm hearing so far is that I'm okay as I don't have the Via chipset. Any reason not to go for it?

A couple questions...I'm currently running VV4 on a PIII-450mhz system, so I'm EXTREMELY eager to move up to something faster as you all could imagine...a couple questions:

1. everyone seems to tout the Matrox G-550 Dual Head Graphics Card as their choice of graphic card (or some other matrox card)...i haven't done much research in this area, but why does this card seem to be the defacto card in video systems? I'm currently just using a dual-vga geforce4 440mx and was wondering what i would gain by getting one of the matrox cards

2. I see people claiming to get AMD 2000+ cpu's, Asus mobo's, and 512mb ram for around $250...where can I find such prices...I really need to upgrade my box, and only want to do the mobo,cpu,ram upgrade and keep everything else for now...but it seems that i'll be spending at least $400-$600 to get something in the mid 2GHz range in either an intel or amd...my biggest goal is to get a good mobo that is fairly flexible for future upgrades...i like asus boards..

3. Finally,...whats the deal w/ serial ata? will my current harddrive work alright (faster) with these ports? do i just need a specific cable to hook up the drive? or do i need all new drives?

thanks!

concerning Matrox, it's probably because it's inexpensive and it's got DualHead (dual screen) capability. Reliability and inexpensiveness being the main concern here.
For gamers though, it's not the best choice as far as I know (I'm really no gamer but I read it more than once).