In relation to the performance of other components of course, is having RAM with fast timings a factor that will significantly improve the performance of a video editing setup?

I already have 2GB of Corsair 'value select' 667 RAM and want to upgrade my processor from a Pentium D 3.0 to a Core Duo 2.40. My mother board can accept higher frequency RAM but don't want to replace my exisiting RAM unless I'll see a good improvement.

(My disks are the SATA II variety)

Thanks

IMO any benefit from faster RAM than you currently have will be marginal. The cost of investing in new RAM can better be spent on adding disks or faster disks, since that is the main bottleneck in most systems. Adding a Raid5 array is more beneficial than faster RAM.

RAID 5 is too slow, and may sometimes cause problems when capturing video. I'd recomment RAID 0.

Memory is important only if you do a lot of effects that need rendering.

There are two aspects to RAM performance: memory timings / latency, and memory bandwidth.

For video, it's bandwidth that matters. But it's only a few percent difference.

See:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18841

RAID 5 is too slow, and may sometimes cause problems when capturing video. I'd recomment RAID 0.

Memory is important only if you do a lot of effects that need rendering.

There are two things to consider, number of disks in the array and the array controller. A good array controller, like Areca, will deliver more than double the performance over a bad one, such as Promise, 3Ware or Highpoint.


With a 3 disk array you may be right that Raid5 is too slow, but that is nonsense if you talk about an 8 disk array or larger. 8 disk Raid5 is way faster than 4 disk Aid0 and who in his right mind would be willing to quadruple the risk of hard disk failure and losing all your data by building 4 disk Aid0???

To give you some examples of performance, using AV Storagemark 2006 Index, gives these results:

Single WD Raptor 360 GD = 100
4x WD Caviar in R0 on Highpoint = 264
4x WD Caviar in R5 on Areca = 324
4x WD Raptor in R5 on 3Ware = 212
4x WD Raptor in R5 on Areca = 365
4x WD Raptor in R0 on Areca = 516
8x WD Raptor in R5 on Promise = 291
8x WD Raptor in R5 on Areca = 544

They speak for themselves.

This table shows 291 test results and will quite clearly show that your remark about Raid5 being too slow is not accurate:
http://tweakers.net/benchdb/test/191/wide/?

Thanks. I stand corrected.