More important for video rendering? RAM or video card?

[TheLuminaireShow]

Not being a computer wizard or nothing I have some general questions in regards to working with video and rendering. First off, here's what I currently have:

HP Pavilion Elite HPE-580t
i7 quad core 3.2 Ghz
12 GB RAM
GeForce GT 440 (Cores: 144; Clock: 594Mhz; Memory: 3072MB)
IPMTB-TK (Truckee) Motherboard

What I surmise is, that having a better graphics card, with memory being the key aspect, helps with display and how fast you can get previews while editing, and that overall RAM helps with general processing speed and rendering of the final product. My current RAM is pretty good overall, however, it's only $130 roughly to DOUBLE that capacity to 24 GB, which is likely to be a pretty big help when working with HD footage. However, it's the graphics card I am not really well versed with and could use input on. Disregarding gaming, which I don't really do or care about, what cards out there excel in the video editing department and how do I find out what my computer can handle? What aspect is the important one for video or, is the RAM overall more important? It'd be nice to upgrade the card to something with DVI and HDMI since my current card only has VGA/HDMI.

Gracias.

[Otohiko]

RAM.

For video editing as such, you're going to get very little benefit from your video card, and most consumer-level video cards aren't even geared to be used for things like rendering in 3D modeling software. So you'd be better-served by more RAM and a faster processor.

[Pwolf]

RAM

Some editing programs are optimized to use video cards (mostly Nvidia because of CUDA) but they are really only useful if the source is formatted to a specific specification. So using DVDs, frameservers, downloaded h264s, or lossless formats, as we ask people to use, wont benefit much, if at all, from these optimizations.

That said, at 12gb, you really don't need any more RAM unless you plan on doing extensive work in After Effects at HD (and higher) resolutions. You're better of putting that money towards fast/reliable storage. At HD resolutions, using UTVideo, Adobe Premiere will work nice and smooth with your current specs.

[Zanzaben]

Well first off you really can't get a much better graphics card because your motherboard doesn't have any PCIe 3.0 slots, so that means you couldn't get a GTX card and all of the GT cards aren't that big of an upgrade. Besides that what Pwolf said about storage is also very important especially when it comes to the number of disks that you have. This all has to do with Adobe products but I assume that other video editing works in a similar way, if it doesn't than someone please correct me. It is super important that you have multiple drives in your computer so that you will never be reading and writing data to the same place at the same time. You want at least 3 disks so if you currently have you entire computer stored on your C: drive then definitely go out and by 2 more drives so that you can have a D: and E: instead of more ram. I will refer to this thread a disk set up and if you don't use adobe then I would say look on your software's forums for a similar thread, http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972. If however you already have a decent disk setup then by all means buy more ram because, at least in my mind, you can never have to much ram.

[JudgeHolden]

Well first off you really can't get a much better graphics card because your motherboard doesn't have any PCIe 3.0 slots, so that means you couldn't get a GTX card and all of the GT cards aren't that big of an upgrade. Besides that what Pwolf said about storage is also very important especially when it comes to the number of disks that you have. This all has to do with Adobe products but I assume that other video editing works in a similar way, if it doesn't than someone please correct me. It is super important that you have multiple drives in your computer so that you will never be reading and writing data to the same place at the same time. You want at least 3 disks so if you currently have you entire computer stored on your C: drive then definitely go out and by 2 more drives so that you can have a D: and E: instead of more ram. I will refer to this thread a disk set up and if you don't use adobe then I would say look on your software's forums for a similar thread, http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972. If however you already have a decent disk setup then by all means buy more ram because, at least in my mind, you can never have to much ram.

PCI 3 cards are backwards compatible with PCI 2 ...

[Zanzaben]

PCI 3 cards are backwards compatible with PCI 2 ...

Indeed it is, I feel silly for forgetting that. However it doesn't change my suggestion though, I would prioritize the disk setup, and then depending on if you do work with a lot of layers of HD footage in After Effects then get the extra RAM, if you don't do that then the a video card would probably be better also because of the dvi out-ports that you want.

[ZephyrStar]

RAM.

Even with 3d programs, your card is kinda useless for rendering. Might not be that way in the future, but currently I would invest in the extra memory.

(I maxed out my own machine to 32gb )

[TheLuminaireShow]

Well first off you really can't get a much better graphics card because your motherboard doesn't have any PCIe 3.0 slots, so that means you couldn't get a GTX card and all of the GT cards aren't that big of an upgrade. Besides that what Pwolf said about storage is also very important especially when it comes to the number of disks that you have. This all has to do with Adobe products but I assume that other video editing works in a similar way, if it doesn't than someone please correct me. It is super important that you have multiple drives in your computer so that you will never be reading and writing data to the same place at the same time. You want at least 3 disks so if you currently have you entire computer stored on your C: drive then definitely go out and by 2 more drives so that you can have a D: and E: instead of more ram. I will refer to this thread a disk set up and if you don't use adobe then I would say look on your software's forums for a similar thread, http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972. If however you already have a decent disk setup then by all means buy more ram because, at least in my mind, you can never have to much ram.

This was something I had not even considered regarding multiple drives. I only have my 2 TB HDD and an external 500 GB one. So you are saying it's more efficient to put all your source material on one drive and have it render to a separate one? Although having looked at that guide, which is very helpful, a third HDD for cache and export would seem optimal and not excessive.

The thing about the RAM was that it's so cheap for such a substantial increase I see little reason not to, you know? I'm new to After Effects but I can potentially see myself getting layer intensive with hi-res footage, so again, little reason not to. I see it's of more importance than the graphics card but at the same time if I can both double my RAM and upgrade my card to something with better outputs with the same or better graphics capability for less than $300 for both than that is something I would be very interested in. I just have no idea what cards my motherboard supports.

And yes I have the Adobe production suite, so I use Premiere, AE and PS.

[BasharOfTheAges]

To be completely honest, even a simple OS (software level) RAID 0 set-up of a few HDDs will be fast enough for throughput unless you normally work with huge frame sizes (i.e. in excess of standard 1080p HD). I would recommend running your OS and software on a separate drive than your storage though - an SSD is even better for this.

[TheLuminaireShow]

So, both RAID 0 and SSD are new to me. An SSD is apparently just a much faster and more efficient drive that would be more useful for information you access constantly, like the OS and your programs, correct? What size would be sufficient then for Windows 7 64-bit and the Adobe suite + ? Then which of the HDDs would be better for storage and the other for cache? Does a RAID 0 setup require hardware, software or both?