Why? People have been using much slower chips with those apps for ages, and it's been just fine. There comes a point where you need to justify the price for the speed increase. And I'd say that home use of CS4 and Vegas will work just fine on a basic Quad Core as long as it is paired with decent ram and some speedy drives.

It makes no sense to spend $500 today on a chip that will be $200 in 3 months. In the chip world, I'd never pick the current top of the line unless I had money I wanted to waste.

Scott, so you got me thinking about refurbs and I saw this:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...IN#detailspecs

What do you think?

Where's the HDMI port on this sucker?

There isn't one. I'd probably add a graphics card.

I agree, just don't think the older Intel quad core is as good as Phenom for this type of work. The phenom would be less expensive now, easier and cheaper to upgrade down the road, and perform comparably to the Intel. If performance is needed, then the i7 wins hands down.

There are some pretty comprehensive benchmarks out now that are worth looking at.

Check out this deal:

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/918678/

PTravel your list of parts didnt include a graphics card?

If you dont need any drives except 1 HD and 1 DVD, IMO that case is overkill in both size and price

I've got a PCI graphics card sitting around that I'm going to try first. Eventually, I'll set up a terabyte Raid 5 in the machine, but for now it'll store data on a NAS Raid system I have.

Incidentally, I wound up with a different (and more expensive) setup:

1 x ($219.99) CPU INTEL|C2Q Q9400 2.66G 775 45N R

1 x ($169.99) MB ASUS INTER P5E X38 775 RETAIL

1 x ($99.99) MS WIN VISTA HM PREM SP1 64BIT 1PK% - OEM $99.99

Scott, unfortunately I read your post after I placed the order so it looks like I know what I'll be doing next weekend.

1 x ($59.99) PSU TT|W0100RU 500W RT - Retail $59.99

1 x ($29.99) CASE ROSEWILL|R222-P-BK RT - Retail $29.99

1 x ($59.99) HD 500G|WD WD5001AALS % - OEM $59.99

1 x ($31.99) CPUCOOLER|ARCTIC P4|ACFZ7-PRO R - Retail $31.99

I picked up 4 gig of RAM for $89 from another source.

I've completed my video editing computer using the parts list, above. It turns out that the video card I had didn't have a 64-bit driver, so I wound up buying a relatively cheap ATI card at Frys.

This machine is screamingly fast compared to what I'm used to. Premier Pro CS4 runs just great -- no problem with HD previewing. It's very quiet and actually runs cooler than the P4 that it replaced. The ASUS motherboard comes with an overclocking utility that runs it at 2.8 gig, though I'll probably wind up fiddling with it at the BIOS level when I have some time. At some point, I may install another 4 gig of RAM to bring the total up to 8 gig, but for now I'm happy with what I've got.

Thanks, everyone, for the advice!