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Top of the lingitale system in Late 2001\Early 2002

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Compgeke

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As I recently got a Pinnacle FX500, I'm trying to determine what would have been a top of the line system for Late 2001\Early 2002 to install it in, to show my Digital Media class how video editing has changed from needing special hardware that cost over $500 to being able to edit video with Premiere CS5 on the school's Core 2 Quads.

Right now I'm thinking that a REALLY high end system would have Xeons and a U320 RAID setup, but a more average high end would be something like a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 Northwood Core, 512 MB to 1 GB ram, a Matrox G550 or similar as it supported Dual Monitors out-of-box, and was cheaper than the GeForce 3 series (not gaming anyways). Hard Drives could be simple with something like ATA133 drives, maybe a RAID controller but as long as there are separate drives for OS and Video, it should be good.

Anyways the basic information I'm looking for is what would be a fast processor, a good video card (high res dual monitor output) and most ram findable for the time.
 
You'd have to find a timeline of processors then consider that the latest advertised processor typically wasn't available (sorta a scam to claim the market but magical shortages of parts or motherboards that never came out would keep you from being able to have one). Then consider the cost of the latest and greatest. A personal computer budget wouldn't likely afford such a system when the processor costs $900, the hard drive similar, etc.

For professional systems though you'd have two drives to separate the OS and application buffering issues and host them 1 drive on each controller port. 512MB was pretty good and 98se or such would probably still been in use or perhaps Windows 2000 but that was still being adopted. Sorta depends if your sample person is always on the dangerous cutting edge of yet to be proven technology and wasn't burned by Windows ME.

The other catch is whether the software being used supports dual processors. If not you'd be fooling yourself and it would just run off a single processor/thread anyway. XEONs weren't popular with a home crowd. Price, size, and cooling were all horrible with the XEON line.
 
Most editing rigs didn't come with Xeons. Pentium 4 Northwood (533FSB) with RDRAM would be period correct along with an Adaptec U320 card with a single 10-15GB 10k RPM SCSI drive (if you are doing uncompressed or HuffYUV lossless capture, hardware MPEG cards needed much less power). The Pinnacle card likely only works with Windows 2000 and some ancient version of Premiere (like the horrid 6.0). Driver support for any video editing card for a version of Windows newer then what it came with is hit-or-miss.

One of my capture rigs is a Northwood 2.8HT (800FSB) with 1GB of RAM with a bog standard 7200rpm ATA133 HD (video drive is SATA 7200rpm 1TB) paired with an All-in-wonder 9600XT capture card. It can easily handle capturing HuffYUV video with no dropped frames even to the WD 120GB OS drive. This setup was killer back in 2003-04 since it was dirt cheap compared to the fancy Pinnacle NLE cards and offered the same exact quality.
 
That must be some odd auto-correct fail, I could have sworn I typed Line...

I'm not too worried about having modern support, I'm looking to make a "snap shot" of something from the time frame as an example of what was once required for editing video as opposed to today where you can take a video with your cell phone and do some basic editings there and input to your Netbook and work with it.

Right now I have a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 in a old Intel motherboard that uses rimm ram, I believe it has 512 MB ram on it.
 
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