Greetings,

One important point in your system build I would very strongly recommend buying the best Quality RAM strips you can get, Kingston etc.

Whilst working with a new Pentium 4 system and a cheaper brand of RAM it caused me months of problems and failed edits, crashes and other wonderous funky happenings like destroyed drives, PSU, graphics card etc.

Now I have a system that is both stable and excellent for video editing and is quite affordable too.

MB Asus A7N8X
Processor AMD Semperon 3000 running at 2GHz ( not its max speed)
RAM Kingston DDR 400 Mhz 2 x 512MB strips
Graphics NVIDIA Sparkle 256MB DDR
Sound On Board Legacy AC 97
DVD RW Pioneer 108
DVD Rom AOPEN 16x
CD RW Liteon 52x32x52
Expansion Ultra ATA 133 IDE RAID Card
HDD1 Sanyo 160GB ATA 133
HDD2 Maxtor SATA 120 GB (not Raid configured)
HDD3 Maxtor 160GB ATA 133
HDD4 Sanyo 160GB ATA 133
Capture Dazzle 150

The Sanyo hard drives are superb for the price. The two in my machine have turned out a good two years of heavy workload without a single problem. Access time is also pretty good and the whole lot has given me a great amount of good video quality turnout. The Maxtor drives I use as work drive on the SATA and storage on the other one.

Hope this info helps, if one person is saved from the trauma of bad Memory strips or incompatability then it is worth it.