Alex, I am wondering if, like me, you are expecting a 1:1 playback when scrubbing and the ever so slight jittering of the timeline is annoying you to the point of doing this research.
Just edited something recently and it wasn't terrible. It wasn't bad enough that I had to spend $500 on a video card to fix. Using strictly DSLR footage, I edited as needed, and just sharpened and adjusted color afterwards on an adjustment layer. Mind you, I do not have any fancy disk setup. I use different drives to the OS for editing and keep everything on that drive, nothing special for exporting or previews, at least not yet. Whatever you are dealing with I suspect is not close to as bad as I am dealing with. I suppose it MAY be a situation where we have to ask ourselves if we are being impatient or something?
Again, it sounds like you pretty much have to deal with what I deal with, which is, forget about any sort of smooth playback if you add denoiser or anything from magic bullet. They simply have to be rendered, or as I mentioned, I will finish my edit and do these things last and just export.
With that said, I do intend to build a new machine by next April. I am waiting for Windows 9 and the 800 series of video cards. I intend to use the intel 4930 6 core CPU. I am not the most savvy with hardware, but it seems as though this is the best bang for the buck compared to the 1000 dollar extreme version of the CPU, and I figured 12 cores via hyperthreading have to lend itself better to video editing and exporting than 8, right? As for video card, being on sub-500 CUDA cores compared to the 2000 of the newer cards, I would hope those new cards add SOMETHING to the equation. Would love to know what EXACTLY CUDA cores do for me, and if more means anything substantial.
Bill, thank you for your input. I have essentially learned that with my next build, I should be pretty content with that 800 series card, and per Bob, my RAM will be maxed at 64GB I am thinking.
Alex, PCPartpicker is your friend!