There's a price premium here compared to building this system yourself. However, with all the custom components and associated configuration times, you are going to break even in time spent. RAIDs, for example, are time-consuming to format. Besides, if you bought these components by mail-order, you'd have to pay shipping - but Cerise offers free ground shipping. And, in the rush to hit the power button, you'd probably forget to clean up all the cable runs - but Cerise wouldn't. So you pay your money and take your chances, but for all you get, Cerise has a very powerful contender for your editing system dollar.

OS: Microsoft Windows XP Professional
RAM: 4GB, DDR2-667, ECC, fully-buffered
Processor: Intel Xeon E5410 (quad-core), 2.33GHz
Chipset: Intel
Number of Physical Processors: 2
Video Editing Software Included: Roxio Easy Media Creator 9
Analog Video Capture Card Included: No
Hard Drives: Boot: Hitachi 1TB, 7200RPM (formatted capacity: 931.5GB); Array: 3Ware 9650SE-4LPML RAID controller with 4 Seagate 250GB, 7200RPM drives (formatted capacity: 698.46GB)
DVD Burner: Plextor PX-800A
Disc Authoring Software Included: Roxio Easy Media Creator 9
Multiple Monitor Connections: Yes

• Great component choices
• Speedy disk subsystem

• A little pricey, but comparable when you consider time spent building a similar system

Hands-down, one of the speediest video editing machines we've seen.

Charles Fulton is Videomaker's associate editor.

Cerise
338 Clubhouse Rd.
Hunt Valley, MD 21031
www.cerise.com
$4,152 as configured