Help: Hardware choices, rendering time

[Jarhead]

I have several choices for rendering video, and reducing rendering time. Talked with Corel, and they just gave me a generic reply, more memory, faster CPU, faster graphics card with CUDA, faster hard drives. They could not give me any idea how much whatever would help, just these things help.

I have two possible scenarios, which I am processing HD video @ 1920 x 1080p:

A dual Quad Core 5680 64-bit 3.33 GHz Xeon machine with 32Gb of memory, plain jane video card (no cuda or anything).

A Core 2 660 2.4 GHz 4 Gb RAM, NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450/400 SDI.

If I were to upgrade the second machine with the Core 2 what would give me the most improvement of rendering speed? Adding more memory (and at what point does the improvement not help as much), Raptor 10,000 RPM Hard Drive (would a SSD drive be better), GeForce GTX 590 (or ATI equivalent?), and/or Intel Core i7-990x 3.4GHz (with 3.7GHz turbo boost) Six core 12 Threads?

[Black Lab]

They could not give me any idea how much whatever would help, just these things help.

If you are looking for specifics, it is difficult. Render times not only depend on the hardware involved, but also what you are rendering. Effects, filters, audio, transitions, etc. all affect render times.

[Jarhead]

I'm primarily taking 1920 x 1080 p video, cutting portions out, and then adding some black screens with text on them, then saving it as 1920 @ 1080 p.

Nothing fancy.

With this in mind, then what would your recommendations be?

[aljimenez]

I am not sure anyone can give you sure-thing recommendations. My suspicion is the best to do is get more memory for that Core 2 machine will give you the cheapest upgrade. Also consider one of the USB solidstate hard-drives that are ReadiBoost capable as another possible cheap upgrade... Al