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Originally Posted by Richer
What you want is not nessessarily the biggest/baddest cpu you can get (though it does help quite a bit), but you want a good quantity/quality of ram. Having a good amount of ram definately helps when you're processing large video files (at least IME). I would suggest at least 512MB of ram.
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Speaking of RAM, it might be a good idea to buy a motherboard that supports Dual Memory Channels (at least when buying a P4 motherboard). Then, if the price is similar, try to get 2 sticks of RAM rather than 1 stick and take advantage of the Dual Memory Channel support (IE. if you want 512MB of RAM total, then you should buy 2 sticks of 256MB instead of 1 stick of 512MB). Using Sisandra on my P4, 2 sticks of RAM vs 1 stick of RAM gave me a large advantage in the Memory benchmarks. Something like 50% better.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=760374
"Intel's P4 architecture, in contrast, is designed to exploit the increased bandwidth afforded by dual channel memory architectures. The 64-bit Quad Pumped Bus of the modern Pentium 4 CPU working at 800MHz, in theory, requires 6.4GB/s of bandwidth. This is the exact match of the bandwidth produced by the Intel i875 (Canterwood) and i865 (Springdale) chipset families. The quad pumped P4 FSB seemed like drastic overkill in the days of single channel SDR memory, but is paying handsome dividends in today's climate of dual channel DDR memory subsystems."
http://www.corsairmicro.com/main/875_benchmarks.html
"Second, obviously, is that dual channel memory provides significant performance improvements over single channel memory. So, it is therefore very important to populate both memory channels in dual channel boards."