New maya box with firewire

I have just spec’d a new machine for a buddy and would like some input please i have good results with my edit machines but am not that familiar with maya boxes I am restricted a little by supply in nz and price nz dollar are about 49c/dollar US my main concern is handling complex scenes including live. I have seen a horrible slowdown with gaming cards in live on an athlon so hoping this machine sings, we are unlikely to use RDram as supplier not keen price wise, also is this DVD writer any good? and DVD authoring software whats good I have limited experience again I am an Athlon supporter all the way but am not sure if its the right move in this case as Ive only seen 2.2 down this neck of the woods.
We have to go XP as we will be running Avid DV express 3.5 for its awesome colour correction and slowmo. thanks for any input

Customer Name: jumpingjackflash
Date: 3/12/2002
Specification
Mainboard GIGABYTE GA-8PE667 Ultra
CPU INTEL P4 2.53GHz Northwood 533FSB
Ram 2x512MB DDR333
Display Card LEADTEK QUADRO4 750 XGL 128MB
Hard Drive Western Digital 40 GB 7200RPM
Floppy Drive 1.44MB
Case SERVER Tower case with Door Lock
Power Supply 400W ATX
Backup HDD Western Digital 80GB 7200rpm
RAID 2xHDD Western Digital 200GB 7200RPM
DVD+RW/R Ricoh 5125 DVD+RW/R
generic firewire card
Sound Card 3D on board
CD Writer LG 48x 16x 48x
Mobile RACK IDE with fan 3 (for pulling backup and raid out to run different jobs)
Network Card 10/100 on board
Operating System Windows XP PRO OEM
System Price $7448.75inclGST
7,448.75 NZD New Zealand = 3,726.71 USD

are you doing RAID 0 or RAID 1 with those 2 hard drives?
if its storing mission critical data I’d do RAID 1(mirroring) or at least get a decent tape system.
if its just a temporary storage for video then RAID 0 is peachy
otherwise sounds like a good system to me.

how bout you order 1 for me as well.

Hi Jack

Have you taken alook at the Asus P4PE Ultra Socket 478 Motherboard ?

has all this onboard ( not that I really have a clue about P4 boards, prefer AMD myself … but am about to buy the AMD version the Asus A7V8X Ultra )

533Mhz FSB,
3x184pin DDR slots,
1xAGP
6xPCI
2xIDE ATA100
2xSerial ATA
*6xUSB2
*2xFirewire
*Integrated 6 Channel Audio
*Integrated 10/100/1000 LAN
*Integrated RAID Controller

May save you on getting extra cards ( and allow for upgrades later )… but they are releasing the P4G8X Deluxe ( can have upto 4Gig dual-channel DDR )

think PP.co.nz has the P4G8X for round NZD$475 (think that includes all the optionals too)

hope that helped …

Cheers

Waz

thanks for replies, Ive been looking at the bench’s around the net and have noticed the SIS 648 chipset looks hot. I will be going Raid 0 for video drive its so much nicer to edit with, Im wary of serial ATA as only seagate drives availiable and my last few builds with there drives the Raid 0 sucked a kumara slower than a single drive 15mbs- WD I get 44mbs with 16k format NTFS. anyone with experience editing with sis648 chip?
I would love AMD but the posts seem to indicate Intel better in view perf in maya, hey I trust this site! for info! cheers for the help!