Thanks - I saw it. But it was hard to gauge compared to other cards. Apparently the low end card (the R7 370) provides the same as the much more expensive card (R9) and the R7 370 is supposedly a now pretty old GPU. Given power consumption numbers too I am left wondering as to the overall benefits if I'm only editing video a handful of times per month and can better appreciate why some have dedicated machines for the task when they edit professionally on a regular basis. Same goes with me for music, but that's a much easier task being less intensive.

Might be better to just keep the old 560ti along with the 3770k and eventually make that the dedicated machine and use the money for a new architecture that is worthwhile - and until the video software situation becomes clear. It's a rendering/preview only benefit with nothing for encoding, which is pure CPU. I guess it will be wait and see and hold onto Vegas 12 until the picture becomes clearer.... eventually.

With 3770K it might be a good choice to stay with what you have as the MB for it doesn't support PCIe 3.0. You could try and get a GTX580 of eBay which will make some a difference and is not that expensive to get but also consumes a bit more power. The advantage with the older cards is that SONY AVC and MC AVC encoding is fast. As long as you are not into 4K and want Best/Full preview without proxies then you are good to go.

Yes, that's good advice. Although reading someone else's i5 comparison just now makes me realize that the i7-3770k will render about as fast or faster than even a GTX 580 and, even if slightly slower, will probably result in somewhat better rendering. The only real benefit will come in the preview mode where a video card should help and where the built in video can stutter in HD mode and crawl when you have some filters. Will have to wait and see what Sony plans to do or buy a lower power video card that primarily helps with rendering. Thanks again.