I will probably buy a Sony hvr z1 so probably both!

I recommend you check out this great site, put together by Hulk, a forum member here:

Vegas benchmarks

The more people post their specs etc off to this site, the better. Actually, I still need to... :)

Ben

Thanks!
That was interresting.
I can`t wait to see the results of the new test he`s going to make for wegas 6.

Feel free to speak if you have anything to say about what equipment to use with Vegas!

Don't forget to check in on any chipset (mobo) factors with your audio cards/drivers, your I/O scenario, and any heat issues that may come into play (Athlon/A64). That site is good, but leaves out this other end on DAW related systems.

1- Best CPU:
For single CPU systems for VIDEO, a prescott-core Pentium shows a slight edge over AMD processors in DSE's rendertest.veg
Dual cores will shake things up...

The results from single CPU systems don't necessarily apply to dual CPU systems. AMD should scale up better (more bandwidth between processors).

2- I would get a dual monitor Nvidia card. They have slightly better drivers than AMD (better dual monitor options), and better openGL acceleration. Neither are a big deal for Vegas as far as I know.

Matrox is pricey and not that good anymore. They do support triple monitor setups.

3- Ideal monitor setup IMO is a NTSC monitor and 2 LCDs. The NTSC monitor gives the most accurate image for DV work hands down. On a budget, a TV will be ok (try to calibrate it). Any TV is far superior to a computer monitor.

With the TV or NTSC monitor, response time shouldn't be a big deal. Personally, I'd look for a hot deal on a LCD. Dell often has sales and their LCDs have decent specs from what I've seen.

Check out digital tiger's LCD database for specs. It has very good info on bezel size (the extra area on the sides of a LCD, which may be annoying in dual monitor setups).

http://www.digitaltigers.com/displays.shtml

With two LCDs, get the right Nvidia card with dual DVI output. No need to get Matrox unless it's cheaper (unlikely?).

4- I've ran some tests on hard drive speed on rendering speed....
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18784

I don't have a RAID setup to play with, but from what I can figure out, a RAID setup is not worth it. With "fake" RAID like the RAID on motherboards, promise hardware cards, RAID may be slightly slower because it sucks CPU cycles. Hardware-based RAID (RAID calculations done on the hardware card) requires expensive RAID controllers like 3ware, RAIDcore, ?highpoint? (not sure about that one), etc.

I don't have a RAID setup so I can't test my claim about fake RAID being slower.

Ideal setup would be a system drive (I wouldn't get a Raptor) and seperate drives for video storage. Video-only drives avoids fragmentation issues.

Fastest drive setup is to read off one drive and render to another. 2 drives un-RAIDed in this way is faster than RAID 0. You need to manually wrangle your renders though. And really, it doesn't make much of a difference.

Get as much storage as you can, that definitely makes a difference. Larger hard drives are preferable to smaller ones. They are slightly faster, take less space/power/cooling/hard drive controllers, and will last a little longer because of that.

All drives in one PC is probably the best idea.

5- No experience with network rendering, but from what I've heard it's not as great as you think it is. There are caveats to it.

6- Ultimate Vegas editing PC would probably be a 4-way or 8-way Xeon, or 4-way/8-way Opteron. Opteron should scale up better, so it might be faster than Xeon.

From a practical standpoint, you want to look at a single-processor system versus a dual-processor one.

RAM configuration makes a minor difference in performance. I have no information on the newer platforms out there, but try to get matched pairs of the exact same model/capacity RAM. Install them according to the motherboard manual... this can make a difference. Ask me at g9chanATryerson.ca for 865/875 chipset info if for some reason you need it (that's an outdated chipset though).

Overclocking does make your system faster, but you risk instability. You should stress test with prime95, but that doesn't always catch instability (which happens on my computer).

Vegas 6 was just optimized for dual processors, so I would look into that.

Generally, building your own system gives the best performace because YOU, not some factory looking to shave costs by cutting corners gets to pick all the parts.

Overclocking instability can be eliminated by determing how far you can overclock your particular system THEN backing off a notch. As far as speed, using faster memory is often overlooked. Relying only on your MB manual generally is too conservative. A better approach is doing a little research of the particular MB you have and visiting several review sites where people are just as passionate about overclocking as some here are about treaking video. These people will have already tested what settings and what memory give the best results and often post a dozen or more eloborate web pages giving the results of various testing and configurations.

If you want a hassle free system don't skim on memory. RAM can generate a fair amount of heat. So buying memory cards that use heat sinks is good insurance your RAM stays cooler. Copper is better.

Billybob, I think we need an organization called speed sluts anonymous...
Anyways...

I've tried to figure out the fastest system for Vegas. What does work:
OVERCLOCKING- This does work. However, I don't know of any way to fully test for instability. Prime95 + CPUBurn overnight is fairly good. You can use memtest86 to test for RAM, but it doesn't catch everything because it doesn't heat up your RAM like prime95 does. SETI or F@H may also be good stress testers as they test different CPU instructions.

However, my machine is prime95 stable... yet it reboots/crashes every several hours. :( Frequency of crashing reduces as I clock machine back... at stock, it crashes/freezes every several weeks. No idea what's going on.

CPU is generally the bottleneck for video editing. I recommend you try to get a fast CPU, or two or four. Dual CPUs should be faster in Vegas 6, but not necessarily. See the threads on how HT doesn't always improve performance. Since we're limited by money, a single processor system may bemuch better value than a slower clocked dual processor system (which are harder to overclock too).

The Thermalright XP-120 is probably THE heatsink to get. Watercooling-like performance, but at a much lower cost. I don't know which is the best fan to get. Look for high airflow at acceptable noise.

Get a quality power supply that's conservatively rated, and doesn't have a fudged rating. Stick with brand names like Antec, Fortron, Sparkle, Enermax, etc. (Antec cases are good value for the case and a quality power supply.)

Artic Silver 5 for the heatsink paste might be worth it.

Higher clocked processors overclock better. How much better depends on manufacturing and market demand and a bunch of other factors.

2- Motherboard tweaks:
You can tweak memory latencies down, but they have no effect on Vegas unfortunately. Other apps may see just a few percent benefit.
My testing:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18841

PAT on the 865 chipset is like a memory latency tweak. It also does nothing.

Spread spectrum is a good tweak for overclocking, but it only improves your OC by a few percent.

3- Memory bandwidth does make a few percent difference.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37831

You can squeeze a few extra percent by getting the optimal memory setup. On the newer chipsets, I have no idea what that is. On Intel (single processor, 9xx series chipset), I suspect it's 4 sticks of double banked DIMMs (it's hard to figure out which these are, but 512MB DIMMs are likely double banked; double sided DIMMs are likely double banked).

Dual core and dual processor systems may benefit more from memory bandwidth than single processor systems.

On AMD64, DO NOT do this. It may be picky about RAM, and 4 sticks may not fly.

4- Buying the best memory:
In my opinion, the added price for overclocking memory (i.e. anything over PC3200 for DDR1) is not worth it for the meagre performance gains. On single processor systems, memory latency makes no difference and memory bandwidth only makes a few percent difference.

Get the cheapest RAM you can get, and underclock it. It's ok to get the cheapest since you will be underclocking it. Get the right RAM speed for your processor of course.

With DDR2, it probably makes sense to get the next speed grade up in RAM as it is not overpriced like overclocking RAM is. And then you can overclock and maintain a 1:1 memory divider.

Premium/low-latency RAM makes no sense as memory timings make no difference.

In Windows, you can go into task manager and set Vegas to "real-time priority". This does make like a 1% difference.

In Windows, you can go into run--> msconfig and disable unnecessary startups. Basically, look at your system tray for the applications you do need and disable everything but those.

5- From a practical standpoint, I would get a builder like monarchcomputers.com to build a system and not bother with overclocking. There are better things to do than to mess with computers. (Blasphemy I know...)

6- If network rendering is any good, take advantage of Dell hot deals and get yourself a render farm. They have some stupid, stupid prices on computers hoping they make money off overpriced upgrades.

Dual CPUs should be faster in Vegas 6, but not necessarily. See the threads on how HT doesn't always improve performance

I believe most of the threads dissing HT, having been talking about HT on a single processor machine and it's totally system dependent if HT will be faster or slower.

I think dual CPU's have been doing quite nicely with Vegas 6. Definitely read those threads though.

Thank you guys!

Lots of helpful info here!

I have one more question:

What will be the fastest editing solution 1 very fast single cpu or 2 slower dual cpu`s?
for example 2x AMD Opteron 244 1,8 GHz or 1x AMD Athlon 64 4000+ 2,4

glennchan why not choose a raptor disk as system disk, I have heard much good about it, fast and reliable.

My two cents...
1) I am still mixed between having the fastest P4 and a dual Xeon. The reason is that multi threading is still in its infancy with Vegas. I really don't know how more more benefit you would get from having an dual or 4 way Xeon vs the fastest P4. Is it worth the money and are you hitting the sweet spot with that. From the numerous postings, it seems like the rendering process is multi-threaded but it's not very specific. What I mean by that is that there are a lot of 3rd party apps that plugs into Vegas such as Magic Bullet and Pixelan which I am not sure they are mutli threaded as well to take advantage of multi processors. I do think it will give you a big boost during rendering and no doubt about that and that's where most of the time is spent but personally, I also like to see more performance during compositing of complex effects. Having a multi processor PC may not exactly help during your edits and using the application. It will only aid in rendering.
2) I personally can't comment on this as I don't have that much experience with that many different cards.
3) I think one of the most important factors to look in an LCD is the response time. Don't get caught up too much with size and the low price. Spend a little more on a lower response time LCD. I would stick to 12ms or less. You want crisp and clear images and not ghosting effects.
4) If you have it all on the same PC, you will have a better performance vs having it on a separate storage network. Unless you have a fibre card or a gigabit ethernet. What you can do is have it back up to a network drive but in my opinion, I would stick to having all drives in one PC.
I mentioned this in a prior post but here it goes again, you will see a big performance boost by going to a RAID0 array. There is a huge risk of losing everything though if one of your drives goes down but just have a systematic way of backing things up on a nightly basis. I switched to RAID a couple of years ago and I started with a Hardware PATA raid and the performance is day and night. It won't improve your rendering performance but it is very fast when it comes to cuts on very large size files and moving around a huge file. There is almost no wait time using this setup when you jump/cut/edit from these 10-15GB sized files. I also have hardware SATA RAID and personally, I think the performance is more or less the same as PATA RAID. The perfect storage setup is have a single system drive where all your apps are installed, then have a second drive where all your VEG projects and rendered files are stored, and the third drive would be your array for video capture and where the massive video files are stored during editing. Backup that 3rd drive regularly and your project and you should be fine.

As far as your last question on whether a faster single CPU is better than 2 slower dual CPUs, I guess that depends on where you want your peformance gain. If you want faster renders, I think 2 CPU's can help in Vegas 6 to speed up your process. However, if it's on single threaded tasks such as the actual creating of special effects, compositing, and just using Vegas 6 aside from rendering, you probably won't gain much performance in my opinion. I'm sure a lot of people are going to disagree but I won't change my mind unless there are some more details about how Vegas 6 is a multi threaded application as a whole and not just rendering.

-------------------------glennchan why not choose a raptor disk as system disk, I have heard much good about it, fast and reliable.----------------------------------------
When you're in Vegas, the speed of the system drive won't make a big difference. You only wait on the system drive when you open a new instance of Vegas or another program, which isn't that often and you don't wait very long for your computer to read off your system drive.

It's the speed of your video drives that kind of matter more. Although generally drive speed is not a bottleneck as long as you are working with DV.

Practically, you can get like a 7200rpm 200GB drive for the price of a raptor... the extra storage makes the 200GB drive a better choice in my opinion. Save money with the system drive because it's better spent elsewhere.

Reliable: It's a first generation drive so it's hard to tell how reliable it is. storagereview.com has a hard drive database that might have decent data on how reliable the raptor is.

2- Value-wise, you can't go wrong with a single processor system. If you are just doing this as a hobby, that's what I would get. Currently a Prescott-core Pentium is your best bet for single processor systems.

Dual cores will shake things up and make things more complicated. The AMD processors coming out will support the SSE3 instruction set, which will make them faster at MPEG2 encoding with the Main Concept encoder.

If you want a system now, I'd consider setting yourself up to upgrade your CPU 2 years down the line (and dual cores will have matured by then, and fallen in price). Get a quality power supply (a little more than you need perhaps), DDR2 RAM, probably a quality full-size case (not mATX) that's easy to work inside (i.e. Antec, Chenbro Gaming Bomb, etc.), and a newer chipset motherboard. Hopefully the newer dual core processors that come out will be compatible with your motherboard. If you don't want to take that chance, get a cheap motherboard and be prepared to have to replace it.

If it's not urgent, it's probably worth it as dual core Intels should hit the market and at very decent prices from what I've seen. Computers are always getting faster though, so it doesn't always make sense to wait for the next greatest thing because it will be obsolete in a few months.

re: " I do think it will give you a big boost during rendering and no doubt about that and that's where most of the time is spent but personally, I also like to see more performance during compositing of complex effects. Having a multi processor PC may not exactly help during your edits and using the application."

I get about 65% util while playing back complex compositions and it goes up to 75% as a looping preview loads into RAM - so duals help a tiny bit there, but if I do anything else, like zoom, scroll, or otherwise interact with the Vegas interface, I get 80-98% utilization. So it helps keep the interface responsive while playing back or while making a time selection (since the preview updates in realtime while you drag).

Alright. Now what is the most expensive balls a__ to the wall way to go?

JJK