I recently built a new PC around a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor and 1 gig of PC3200 DDR RAM (2x512mb). I have two more slots open for additional RAM. My question is if I add another gig of RAM, should I expect faster rendering when using Premier Pro?

I think I skimped a little on a video card for this system. I have a NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 (64mb) card. Should I be more concerned with upgrading the card instead?

Thanks for your input.

It might actually make a few percent difference if you add 2 DIMMs of the exact same model. It might increase memory bandwidth, which speeds up video rendering speed slightly. This is definitely not worth doing though!

Video card- you should be fine, video cards don't affect rendering speeds.

I suppose you could save up for one of those real-time acceleration boards. Or you could do something else while rendering (like sleep).

yeah to get better rendering (more then a couple seconds difference) you'd have to upgrade the CPU, motherboard, and RAM. he video card has nothing to do with rendering the video card simply puts the pixels to the monitor. (but that video card does suck no offense)

Kyle: why would you say a GeForce 4 MX 440 "sucks"? That is
such an "opinion". I'm still running my other edit machine with
a GeForce 2 MX. I even play some games on that machine. It
works fine for me.

The only reason to upgrade your video card is if you are doing
heavy gaming, high-end 3D or CAD work.

So unless he is looking to do either of those he is fine with the
card he is running (there are some other exceptions, but not
much).

1 GB ram is usually more than enough for editing and some
effects work as well. More is usually better (you could also do
longer RAM previews which I personally never do), but above
1 GB I seriously doubt most people would use it.

If you do professional editing for a living more might be more
interesting. Rendering speed depends most heavily on the CPU.
After that memory and harddisk speed (bandwidth reasons)
to my opinion.

You could also go with the new Vegas 5 and setup multiple
machine's in a render farm. That allows you to render your
project with multiple machine's.