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Hello friends,
I'm in the process of upgrading my pc to pursue my new found interest in videography.
HOWEVER,
I've been out of the loop for a while and my pc doesn't quite cut it anymore.
I have R5k - ish

PC:
Intel Core2 Duo E6750 - dual core 2.66ghz
Mushkin EM 996527 DDR2-800 2GB (2 * 1GB Sticks) Kit CL5
Asus ATI Radeon HD 2600XT
Omega iSonic Megapower 600W Modular Cabling
Asus P5KC motherboard

Very hard to say. Video ect fall more under the cpu catagory. I would say either go for an i5 or an i7 with 4gb ram minimum. That's a motherboard, cpu and ram replacement. If your not into gaming the radeon can stay.

Intense videography? i7 gets my vote.

I had a friend over today that also reckons I need to focus on a cpu.
he also suggested the i7

guess I'll be looking at cpu+motherboard+ram then?
any more detailed suggestions?

I don't game at all.

thanks for the replies.

Any P55 or H55 board (socket 1156) will do, along with an i7 860 or something. Then you can get 8GB of cheap 1333MHz RAM (a lot of the cheap RAM still have lifetime warranties).

i7 860 ~ R2600
H55 board ~ R850
8GB DDR3 1333 RAM ~ R1600

Total ~ R5050

The LGA1366 motherboards are much more expensive than the H55 boards (at least double), but, along with an i7 930 for the same price as an 860, you would have tripple channel memory. Otherwise the 860 and the 930 are pretty much even, except for the 860 being able to turbo boost to a higher speed (3.06GHz vs 3.46GHz). The LGA1156 route would be the best option with your budget then, since the performance gains between double- and triple channel memory is not very big and the added turbo boost performance would come in handy.


Alternatively you could opt for a hexa core AMD system. The AMD Phenom II 1055t at R2000 has six physical cores (but no hyperthreading) which can give good performance with certain apps. A cheap 890 chipset board goes for about R1000 and with the RAM at R1600 you'll save about R450 with similar encoding performance. The 860 system will still be a bit faster in most situations though.

Purely based on the announcement that intel is dropping the socket 1156 motherboard for the 1155 boards it might be a better idea to go for an X58 1366 board though.

for video encoding, intel over amd imho

My thoughts:

CPU and RAM are the most critical components for your purposes. I'm going to echo the sentiments of others and say that you should look at an i7 with 6GiB RAM at the bare minimum. 12GiB is nice, but I'm not so sure that your budget allows - although you can put more in later of course.

The graphics card can probably stay for now, but if you're going to be doing some serious image manipulation, you may find a workstation graphics card to be useful.

I'm not sure what kind of audio work you're going to be doing to accompany your videos - you may want to investigate recording studio quality cards if you take that aspect seriously as well. If you're just starting out though, onboard would probably suffice for now.

I have my own recording gear for audio production,
I use a presonus firestudio as my sound-card so I'm not concerned about audio at all.

From what I've read it seems that i7 and loads of ram is where I'm heading,
and because ram is relatively inexpensive I could add a grand or 2 onto my budget.
thanks for the help guys,
I'll post when I've ordered my new goodies and I'll eventually share some of my work if anyone is interested,

thank all of you once more.

If you are going to load up your PSU, you might want to get a better one. From what I have read, Isonic have a tendency to blow up under rated load. (though of course only the bad commets tend to get posted)

I second what Prime said.

PPPLLLEEEAAASSSEEE get a good, solid, reputable, brand named PSU with your new setup. You DON'T want the PSU to pop and take other components with it!