Is this system powerful enough?

[Peter Wiggins]

Chris,

What format are you going to be cutting, DV? SD?

Peter

https://www.peterwiggins.com

In Paris editing The French Open for ESPN

[Chris Burton]

DV and then, eventually, SD.

[Alexander Kallas]

Chris,
You really need more RAM, 1.5G is the minimum for these apps.
Alexander

[Chris Burton]

Alexander,

Thanks for the reply.

Does that mean that I need to have 1.5 GB or more in each processor?

[Alexander Kallas]

Chris,
1.5G is an overall RAM figure.
Cheers
Alexander

[Joachim Blunck]

Looks like he has 2GB in his configuration…

Plenty for DV, perhaps a little light for serious SD.

[Phillip Van west]

You will most definitely need more storage, as you don’t want to capture to your startup drive, so I would first add a Hitachi 250GB or 400GB drive as your second internal SATA drive and capture to that. As you progress to more demanding transfer rates, an external SATA drive setup would be one way to go.

pvw

Terra Nova Productions LLC

G5 DP 2.5GHz / 4.5 GB RAM / 2x250GB SATA / OS 10.3.9 / FCP 4.5 / QT 6.5.2

[Mrvideo]

Final Cut Pro 5 can access up to 4 Gigs of RAM so the more you have up to 4 Gigs is going to be very helpful. Your 2.3 GHz is faster than the 2.0 GHz G5 that everyone is using so you should be fine.

[Mitchji]

Hi,

With the current models the 2.3 is a good choice (PCI-X and 8 RAM slots).

You can save some money by ordering the RAM from Crucial.com. I wouldn’t even dream about buying additional RAM from Apple.

If you are sure you won’t want to go over 4 Gigs you could add 4 one half gig chips instead of 2 one gig chips. This will cost substantially less but will fill more slots (you will still have two free slots).

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Peter]

“With the current models the 2.3 is a good choice (PCI-X and 8 RAM slots)”

Does the 2.7 have PCI-X and 8 RAM slots as well?

Also, what graphic card would someone recomend at this point for top-of-the-line performance with FCP 5 and a Decklink HD plus card. With the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL taking up an extra PCI or PCI-X slot, will that severly limit my options for maximizing performace with Decklink and a SCSI or Fibre Channel card?

How different is the performance of the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL from the ATI Radeon 9650 w/256MB DDR SDRAM?

Or should I go for the ATI Radeon 9650 w/256MB DDR SDRAM from the apple store and replace it with a ATI 800X?

Sorry for all the questions but the graphics card choices have me extremely confused!!!

Thanks in advance.