And what would it be?

I am struggling to get mine working well, and keep hearing of systems doing much better, so what is a decent priced system that would work very well?

I have a intel quad core 6600 with a radeon 1650 and 1550 running two dvi monitors and a 42i 1080p lcd, and a dual core 5000 amd, with a nvidia 8600gt and 6200oc with two dvi and one 42 1080p lcd both have several sata2 drives 4 gigs of ram and esata cards to run more external esata drives. They are both running relatively bad in my opinion. One wont play or write cineform avis at all, and is choppy playing hd wmv in vegas, plays mt2 slow but at least usable, the quad wont play mt2 files well at all but plays cineform avis smoothly, but the quad is slower to render than both the dual and an old amd 64 3400 non dual core I am working on figuring out why. But in any event I am thinking of looking into one system built just for this from scratch again so what do you have that works and what does it cost to buy/build?

Any one using Vista? maybe thats my problem, I am thinking of going to XP Pro but not at all sure it would help anything.

if with all this nice equipement, you are not able to run properly video, your problem is not in the hardware.
i run HDV editing on a old northwood pentium 2.8 GHz overclocked at 3.4 with 2 gig of ram, and i am very happy.

Exactly why I am asking, I am very unhappy with the systems as they are and want to find someone who has one that works well, and see what they have so I can build a better system to do this.

Chris, I think the point of the first reply above is that your systems are plenty powerful enough to edit HDV. I have a 3.2 GHz Pentium D machine and use Vegas 7 to edit my HDV footage and it works just fine. Your machines are much more powerful than mine, so as the other poster said, your problem is not in your hardware itself and you don't need a new system.

The problem could be many things, but for sure, you should make sure you don't have any unnecessary programs/processes running.

You absoutely have a system that is strong enough to comfortably work with HDV, I too have a system that is not as powerfull as yours and do so with ease...

Vista was frankly probably a mistake to use and I would defiantely go with Windows XP but I can't say that is your problem.

Jon

Wow - something is badly mucked up, esp. on the Intel quad-core!

I would recommend taking one of the machines and starting again with a fresh bare-bones install of XP, Vegas, Cineform and just one videocard - in particular making sure you have the latest motherboard and video drivers installed properly.

Then run some diagnostics - for example SiSoft Sandra for your CPU cores, memory bandwidth, drive speeds etc - so that you can compare the new system with the other one that's still running in its present state.

I predict something will jump out at you as running much better on the fresh system. Then add the other graphics card and check that its still all OK.

Sandra is nice in that you can compare particular diagnostics against what's "normal" for similar (and faster/slower) hardware - again, something out-of-kilter may jump out at you! Good luck!