[issdaol (Phil)]

Critical components are RAM, CPU, GPU and Hard Drives.

So get the best of each that you can afford on a good/solid Mainboard.

Reason to not forget hard drives is that the information still needs to be read/written and paged out to disk so when choosing hard disks for high performance go with several of the fastest, high speed high cache drives.

Going with very large capacity drives limits your r/w's to a fixed number of channels, heads and spindles for a given capacity whereas going for multiple smaller drives spreads the load and allows you to do multiple r/w operations that do not affect other r/w operations. You may be surprised by how changing hard disk setup can breathe new life into a system.

Also if you are trying to achieve realtime video edits/transitions/titling you may want to consider Canopus/Grass Valley specialist GPU products. These come with plugins for Adobe or you could use the excellent EDIUS app.