I disagree that your problem is the one you’ve assumed you're confronted with. Most modern PCI-E motherboards provide three standard PCI slots for expansion cards, and that should be ample. Motherboards nowadays include a wealth of onboard features, and they should be adequate for most of your needs. You should ensure that your chosen motherboard provides:
- A PCI-E x16 display card slot
- A PCI-E x1 expansion card slot
- Three PCI expansion card slots
- Onboard 6 channel or better audio
- USB 2.0
- Firewire
- IDE and SATA drive controllers, with RAID capability
- Onboard Ethernet LAN
I’d suggest you choose a Socket 939 motherboard and accompany it with an Athlon64 AMD processor and 1G of PC3200 DDR RAM. With that configuration you'll get excellent performance, a future upgrade path to the dual-core AMD X2 processors, and you’ll avoid needing to use the costlier (and similarly performing) DDR2 RAM.
USB 2.0 and Firewire will provide most of the video capture capability you need, the onboard multi-channel audio will be perfectly adequate, and there will be plenty of accommodation for as much fast storage as you’d need.
I’d suggest that a motherboard such as the
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
With a good motherboard to build on, you can keep costs down by choosing an
Athlon64 3000+ at around $220, a
gigabyte of PC3200 ValuRAM at around $165, and have over $1300 left to spend on the rest of the system. It’s quite likely that you’d be able to fit a higher rated Athlon64 processor into your budget.
You’d be well advised to purchase a pair of large capacity SATA hard drives because if you get a matched pair from the outset you'll be able to use the extra performance of RAID if you choose. If not, your video data files should be stored on a drive of their own anyway, to improve performance in a non RAIDed setup.
Contrary to what a lot of people mistakenly believe, you don’t need a high power display card for video editing. You simply need one which provides adequate features. This
X600 Pro card with VIVO provides all the features you’d need. S-Video and composite input/output, component video output, HDTV capability and some 3D gaming as well if you don’t get too demanding.
A pair of 200G SATA drives and that display card should leave you with over $800 left in the kitty, and that should be plenty enough to get you a nice case/power unit which suits your tastes and décor, an LCD flat panel monitor, a wireless keyboard/mouse combination, and even a HDTV tuner card if you want one fitted.
They’re a bit expensive just yet, but later on you can upgrade to an Athlon64 X2 processor to enjoy the benefits of dual-core computing and that quite capable system will really fly when you are editing your videos. It’d be capable enough to meet the most demanding workload you throw at it.
Have fun putting it together!
Cheers,
Terry O'Shanassy