As a hobbyist, I'm really enjoying the switch from Vegas pro 8.0c to FCS3. But my 5 year old iMac with 2gb of RAM is a little long in the tooth for this program. Which new iMac (and video card and amount of RAM) would give me the most bang for the buck? I use FCP (with Colorista) the most, not much Motion (looks wayyyy fun) or Color and finish off with Compressor. The sequence renders seem to tire me out the most.
Again, I'm not a pro user and don't use this program to earn a living. I just want to have it run significantly faster.

Consult the FCS specs at Apple - Final Cut Studio - Tech Specs and System Requirements (http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/specs/) and buy the best iMac you can afford.

I have used a dual core 2.8g i-mac for over a year with no problems, it has 4gb ram and I also use g-tech raid 0 firewire drives. The graphics card is an ATI and it is the 24 inch model.

Thanks Gary, that was a helpful post. I figured the graphics card would help compared to the integrated Intel graphics processor that I'm using now. And you answered another question I failed to ask about firewire 800 with a g-tech.
I had a hunch that the quad core was overkill for my needs.