dvd-r Pentium or AMD?

[anthwork]

Howdy,
At work we are attempting to purchase a new machine which we will be doing DVD-R/+R/-RW capturing and authoring on. I am in need of suggestions from everyone on which platform they recomend going with and hardware ideas.

I am currently hoping to obtain the following:
a Pentium 4 with over 533/500 processor speed / 1.0ghz+
or AMD Athlon/Duron/T-birt 1.0ghz+
1gig of RAM
80gb of hard drive or more
(if available, a faster DVD-R drive -- currently have a 16x one.)
and i think thats it.

I need to find out where I could look for a stable machine with those features. I have heard that purchasing a setup like DELL offers, may be more stabler then trying to purchase and put together a system such as a barebone.

I really need some ideas and suggestions. Anything that seems fast and reliable would be our best bet. We definatly need speed.
looking to spend under $550-800

Thanks!
-anthony @ dubmax

[Kurto2021]

The age old question what is better PIV or AMD....in my opinion if you are looking for the best bang for the buck get an AMD system. I never buy any of the prebuilt systems because they all suck. They are made with parts from the lowest bidder. If you build your own just make sure you get name brand parts and you will be okay. For example your motherboard you would want to get Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, or MSI and you will be pretty safe. If you are using DDR the best chipset is currently the KT333A it will give you the best performance the KT400 is still kind of buggy. Video card is the next decision you need to make and I feel anthing Radeon or GeForce should be sufficient (I always avoid cheap no name companies but that is not a huge problem if you go cheaper on the video card but get a good MB).

The only other decision you would have to make is whether or not you want a raid system. Personally I am a raid fanatic. I have a 3 drive array with 3 60 GB drives and I love it.

OH YEAH.....GET Good Ram as well....crappy Ram can kill a good system

[thedvdguy]

with video editing I would definitely emphasize the RAM. the previous post covered the rest very well. Any 1+GHz processor should do the trick. If you are on a budget go with AMD. Best of luck