To their credit the SoFo team has made a very stable product. I've used Vegas a long time, pushed it hard and can count the number of times it froze on one hand, and then when it did I suspect the fault was Windows, not Vegas.

Total RAM isn't really a issue as long as you have 256MB, you should be OK, however with memory prices still pretty low 512MB is better. I see no reason to add more unless you like to do RAM previews, I rarely bother.

The big bottleneck with any video editing software is processor speed. So the faster the better. While it will run fairly well on a slower machine and a slower PC has no impact if or not it will render or what you can do editing wise, the time gets progressively longer the slower your CPU is once you do rendering. Also slower PC's will result in more hesitation in the preview window. Again, no impact on the final render.

Video display card doesn't matter. Almost any off the shelve video card words fine. If there are video driver issues I don't recall seeing any posted here that are specific to Vegas.

While SoFo suggests a hard drive running at 7200 or higher RPM, many people have reported using external drives that go no faster than 5400 RPM having no problems. What is important for avoiding dropped frames is a SEPERATE hard drive you dedicate to video work.

I see no advantage between Intel or AMD. Some have a dual processor which they report as somewhat faster, but in my opinion not worth the added expense.

The last system I build was with a IWill XP333, CPU 1900 XP+, 512MB DDR memory, a Matrox G550 video card, a 100GB drive, plus several others in drawers, so I can swap. I have another based on a ASUS A7A266.

While Vegas works fine under Windows 98SE, I highly recommend XP and using NTFS for your operating and file system. :-)

I run VV3 on a homebuilt using a T'bird 1320 (1.2G overclocked 10%). VIA chipset, couple of 120GB hard drives in slide-out trays. TNT2 (=ancient) video card, PC133 memory, Windows 98SE. 256MB was fine, but sometimes I would start three instances of VV3, set two of them to idle priority, and have them chug away in the background on some complex renderings while I used the third instance of VV3 to do regular editing in the foreground. It that case, 512MB is very useful and is pretty much all used up by the PC (I can tell because I have "RamPage" running in the System Tray, and it shows exactly how much RAM is in use at the moment).

Once in a while I will tell VV3 to render to tape, and when I come back an hour later I discover that something has blown up and the tape is corrupted. If I render to tape a second time, everything behaves properly. I am beginning to think that my PC can sense my presence and puts on its best behavior when I'm nearby.

Running Vegas 3.0c, very fast and stable, on this homebuilt box. Zero problems capturing or printing to tape.

Best of luck in configuring yours.

G

WinXP home (haven't installed SR-1, "if it ain't broke...")
AMD XP 2000+
Asus A7V333 mobo
512 DDR memory
ADS Pyro 1394 card
Nvidia Geoforce MX 420
several Maxtor 7200 Hds, and a Western Digital SCSI
generic modem
Sony TR-720 digital 8
SB Live value (general audio)
Echo Gina (recording audio card)

riredale says he has several large disks in slide out trays so he can swap them. Good idea. But if you buy one of those trays and put it in your box, can you get extra drawers for your extra disks? Or do you still have to go looking for your screwdriver each time you want to swap disks?

Tor