A friend has asked if I could spec a rig to be used for video editing (Adobe Premiere, After Effects) for about £500. (Possibly including display, I'm not sure.)
I told him I didn't know off hand, but I knew some people who might be able to help to spec something.
The only area I'm fairly confident in is that it would be worth speccing an nVidia card to support CUDA.

Any suggestions for a good spec at around the £500, or is he being foolishly naive in his expectations?

Your feedback and thoughts please!

I'd expect to pay a decent amount more than that, not including the display. I'd say for just the hardware in the box (no OS, screen etc) you're looking at £800 realistically.

Well I've come up with what I think is an adequate spec - http://imgur.com/y9sspqS
Any other suggestions? It's at the top end of his budget really.
He's only going to be pushing HD around rather than 4K, and we can't stretch to a Quadro card.

What sort of video editing? The odd smartphone video or multi source with separate audio feeds?

If the latter, and you really want decent CUDA performance, you can easily pay the 500 quid just for the graphics card.

If it is 4K video, then I 'd be looking at a dual Xeon system, dual CUDA graphics cards and an external SAN or a Thunderbolt RAID array.

From your spec, I'd say double the RAM and I'd look at a second hard drive and an SSD for OS and scratch.

For video editing, I'd also want a colour correct WQHD monitor, which means 500 quid plus.

Without knowing what sort of video your friend wants to edit, I would say that his budget is a little on the low side for a system with decent performance, when he is going to be working with multiple sources and audio.

I know that TWiT TV the webcast channel is switching from Mac Pro towers to Dell Precision workstations with integrated RAID controllers and RAID arrays. The Mac Pros are currently using Fibre Channel cards, but the Fibre Channel adapter in the SAN broke last week and the video for 1 show (1 - 2 hours of video) takes over an hour and a half to copy to the SAN at the moment, because they are limited to multi-channel iSCSI.

It'll be single camera, DSLR stuff. So 1080p and almost certainly not 4K.
CUDA is a priority, but there's no way his budget will stretch to a top end nVidia card.

I'd swap out the motherboard for this one. The price difference is pennies, but it looks like a muich better board.
SCAN LINK

If you're still looking, I'd say that GPU is overkill if you're just getting it for CUDA.

Double the RAM for sure and you will NEED an SSD of at least 240gig as the system drive. £500 is a stretch.

A bit of an update -
I sent over an slightly updated recommendation, he's going to run it by a mate as well. Which is all cool.
I also see he's trying to fund an Xbox One - personally I think he should roll that cash into this rig and use it for some gaming too, but what can you do? Ain't my money.

Why such a big ssd? Surely it's only for the os and apps. You could get a 120gb and get a hybrid drive for work files, temp files, etc.

Sent from my big ass Sony Xperia Z Ultra tabphonelet, using Tapatalk 4.