Originally Posted by Kroy

The Core i7 is unbelievable, great choice.
If you have the dough I'd step up to the 640 which is a bit faster, but not absolutely necessary.

As the others pointed out, def. get multiple drives, ideally one just for your OS/software ("boot drive"), another RAID0 for your Raw content, and another RAID1 for your encoded content.

If that's too pricey you can still get away with non-RAID configurations, just plain single drives - but def. more than just one.

I'd also add another firewire card, only because the one in your motherboard may die all of a sudden (happened to two of my boards) and you'll want a back up.

Finally: MEMORY. If you're getting a 64 bit OS definitely take advantage of the fact that it can utilize more than the 4 Gig which was a limit with 32 bit OS.
Literally, the more memory, the merrier but it needs to be the DDR3 (expensive) kind because of the i7.

Whatever you do, I would not suggest to do anything else on that machine while you are encoding, not even browsing or watching movies. Regardless of how many cores the chip has you'll still take away disk and memory resources when you do anything else.

Flash encoding isn't totally linear, there are spikes - just like when you browse or do almost anything else. This means at one moment your encoder might need additional resources and if you are doing other stuff that has the same shifting requirements you're asking for trouble (dropped frames or much worse).

Hope this helps and best of luck and success