The Frustration: I’ve been accumulating quite a few home videos and finally wanted to do something with them.  My kids have been begging me to place them on DVDs so we can easily watch them on TV — also, I’ve been a little concerned that eventually my mini-dv tapes will gradually go bad like all magnetic media does.   I trudged to the computer and hooked up my firewire to the computer and uploaded the first video.  After 5 hours of processing I realized my computer may be a little outdated — I have an old Dell AMD computer that I thought was sufficient for what I’ve been doing…no longer.

I want a good, fast computer.  One that doesn’t take 5 or 6 hours to process a video which leaves me quite frustrated especially when we’re all now in a culture of having the here and now immediate feedback.  I looked at a decent dell for $1099 that included a 23″ monitor but realized that that would be the easy way out, and also not likely the truly fastest.  For maybe a little more, I was hoping to put together a smoking (possibly overclocked) computer that will let me deal with anything coming my way — especially those videos.

My research: Having never built my own computer before, this was something new to me.  Albeit that I do have an engineering degree with some (though somewhat limited) or maybe just enough knowledge to get me into trouble.  I did loads of research to identify the best price to performance ratio while still getting myself a sweet system.  This is what i came up with:

The Parts:

My next post I’ll chronicle how I set it up and its performance.

What do you guys think of my setup so far?


Kerry is a mother of 2 great kids and a wonderful husband.   Her favorite website is callcatalog.com a reverse phone directory.


The parts are inbound

Lite-ON iHAP222-06 DVD Burner – 22X DVD+R, 22X DVD-R,