New PC Advice - Not sure where to start.

[[TC]»Elmo«]

The Piledriver core has been proven to be at least 15% faster than Bulldozer, as Piledriver is currently available in the new APUs, so proper comparisons can already be made.

The only optimising you can really do for Hyper-threading is to use the instruction sets that HT supports. This will give speed improvements in some kinds of processing, but none (sometimes even slower) with others.

AMD Bulldozer/Piledriver pros:
AMD currently excels at multitasking. It usually wins multithreaded multimedia benchmarks (including compression, video encoding etc) even against more expensive Intels. It's also has better IO throughput. It's not usually so good in the gaming type benchmarks, which is what most people shout about.
Bang/buck Bulldozer currently wins on the whole.
AMD motherboard chipsets usually have much better specifications than Intels and are often cheaper at a similar spec.
Also being able to throw 8 cores at your VMs can only be a good thing

The hyperthreaded Intels typically do better on the single-threaded/unoptimised stuff. Games often fall into that category, but as ever it depends on the game.

If you get an Intel, get an Ivybridge. They're more power efficient and very slightly faster than Sandybridge and are typically around the same price.
If you go AMD it is probably worth waiting for Piledriver (possibly depending on price when it's released).


Radeon v nVidia
Last time I checked, nVidias typically use more power and therefore generate more heat.
nVidia have had design issues with some chips which have resulted in very high failure rates. The problems I've heard about Radeons tend to be more random and often down to poor cooler or component choice by the OEMs. However there are a number of OEMs for Radeons, some being better than others notably Asus, Gigabyte and XFX.

Sensible graphics card choice is generally down to which is better value at the time and whether one has features that you need that the other doesn't.
In your case, it may depend on what is supported by your video editing software. I've heard Vegas 11 Pro doesn't yet support GPGPU acceleration with the latest nVidias, but that may well change. I dunno about the others.


You should have no problem keeping your PSU.


RAM - you're probably alright with 8GB for now. If it becomes a problem, you can always get an extra 4 or 8 in the future - just make sure you get a motherboard with 4 slots.


Motherboard - make sure that it has Realtek audio and nothing VIA. The rest of the specs will depend on what exactly you need.


I'm interested to know how it can take so long to move files on a harddrive, unless it's moving to another drive/partition. Moving on the same drive doesn't involve reading/writing the files themselves, only metadata.
Either way, a large (1TB+) 7200 RPM drive will be much faster (120+MB/s sequential) than your laptop drive. A 120GB+ SSD for system will still be worth it if you can afford it.