is this system good enough?

I'm looking at buying a computer already assembled. It has Vista, AMD 64 x2 4200+, 2 GB RAM, and Nvidia Geforce 6150 LE. My main question is about the graphics card. I do a lot of photo and video editing. When I was overseas I had an intel 3.0 GHz and the computer performed fine. It took about 3.5 hours to render and burn a DVD. I don't remember about the graphics though. The Nvidia 6150 seems to be at the low end of the line, but I play no computer games, so my only concern is about the editing.

2 GB RAM should be enough for editing in vista, right?

 

That setup should be fine. Yes the video card is a little on the wimpy side. Just because you don't play games doesn't mean you don't need a decent video card. If you're working with graphic intense things, your system will run like crap unless you have a decent video card to handle the processes and take some of the weight off the cpu. Throw in an extra $100 and get a decent video card. Especially with Vista, you'll be happy you did.

 

But, what exactly does the video card do for you while video editing? Video playback and gaming, yes, but editing? The compression and encoding relies only on the CPU and RAM, correct? I don't do any video editing, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the video card will have any impact on video editing. In which case, the setup should be fine.

Although, you would probably get more bang for your buck with an Intel Core 2 Duo system right now. Not to mention it would be more future proof.

 

If the cpu has to compensate for the video card because the video card isn't powerful enough to display the graphics, then the cpu works twice as hard. You have to keep in mind that Vista is extremely graphical which is going to eat up most of you video cards power just running it. Then if you start working with video or graphics and the video card can't keep up, it has to rely on the cpu to help it display the best it can. This makes the cpu work harder than it already is and will slow it down. I don't really think goldbough would have any problems with the system he is looking at, but I find it better to just be safe than sorry. Besides it's not like you have to buy an 8800GTX or anything, just get like a 7300 or 7600 nvidia card. They'll cost like $100 and you'll at least know you can run everything without having to replace it later down the road.