Howdy -- been gone 12 months and ...

post-it · Post by **post-it** » Mon Aug 14, 2006 4:46 pm

Howdy
. Been out of the loop for 12 months and sold my older computer
( AMD 2500+ ATI 9200 Capture, WinME and Yamaha 741 Audio card. )

. My question is ... to make my new computer BareBones or Buy something New !?!
-- my problem is, .. .. I do not know what has changed in computers during the last 18 months; can you help ?

THX

PS ... is ATI still the best Capture Card for MPEG-2 -- or has something better come along?

Joe88 · Post by **Joe88** » Mon Aug 14, 2006 5:04 pm

well now we have the ATI ALL-IN-WONDER x1900 2006 edition

a lot has changed from prcoessors to graphics cards and new PCI-E 16x ! slots for your card instead of the old 8x AGP...

your best choice would be to go with putting it togther yourself

right now intel Core 2 Duo x6800 is the fastest CPU avaible right now
though a E6600 and up will still best intels best

that gfx card im mention above is a gfx card, chapter card, tv tuner and much more so its a pretty good value
Plus ATI CrossFire or nVidia SLi which enables you to use 2 top of the line cards at once

Kariudo · Post by **Kariudo** » Mon Aug 14, 2006 10:51 pm

I'd agree with Joe88, build your own...BUT!

SLI is a waste of money unless you plan to do extreme gaming (doom3, quake4, etc) or 3D-rendering (unless I missed some big development recently)
besides...256MB using pci-e interface is good enough (I'd avoid GDDR2 altogether, GGDR3 seems to be the way to go atm)

although intel does have the edge with core2 duo atm, AMD is still good. I'd suggest picking up an X2 3800+ for under $150 (used to retail for $327 before core2 came out) or an x2 4200+

Joe88 · Post by **Joe88** » Mon Aug 14, 2006 11:20 pm

also heard the new x1950xtx and x1650xt and PRO will feature GDDR4
I dont think that true though, I just read it on some web site...

anyways here that card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814102685

TV tuner, FM tuner GDDR3 256MB gfz, this is a amazing mutimedia card

post-it · Post by **post-it** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 4:44 pm

..., "3.0GHz or equivalent minimum CPU is recommended for software encoding requirements of Windows Media Center"

ye`och

sounds like I came to the right place to ask about Video Cards

THx ^_^

Joe88 · Post by **Joe88** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 12:00 am

3.0ghz is the requirment for single core CPU's
as far as dual core , some where around 2.0ghz for a dual core is good

Kariudo · Post by **Kariudo** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 12:45 am

I'm guessing that means an intel p4 3.0GHz or better
any athlon 64 processor (or better, like fx or x2) would/should do the job

...or you could just use vdub(/mod) to do your encoding instead of windows media encoder (knowing WMM...WME probably sucks...but at any rate, doing it in vdub gives you more control which can lead to better results)

any more word on GDDR4 yet? I'm curious to see how it will perform

Joe88 · Post by **Joe88** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 1:51 am

Kariudo wrote:I'm guessing that means an intel p4 3.0GHz or better
any athlon 64 processor (or better, like fx or x2) would/should do the job

...or you could just use vdub(/mod) to do your encoding instead of windows media encoder (knowing WMM...WME probably sucks...but at any rate, doing it in vdub gives you more control which can lead to better results)

any more word on GDDR4 yet? I'm curious to see how it will perform

im looking found quite a bit of pics...

madbunny · Post by **madbunny** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 2:20 am

you know... getting one of those fancy ass cards is nice and all but probably a waste. Every time I splurged and got a 5-600 dollar video card I always enjoyed it at first, but then by next year it was pretty much average.

Just get yourself a good PCI-e 16x video card with enough ram (like 512) and you'll be happy.

quake 4 specs wrote: # Microsoft Windows 2000/XP OS
# Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU
# 512MB of RAM
# 8x speed CD-ROM optical disc drive and latest drivers
# 2.8GB of uncompressed, free hard disk drive space available (plus 400MB for a Windows swap file)
# 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible 16-bit sound card with latest drivers
# 100% Windows 2000/XP compatible mouse, keyboard, and latest drivers
# 3D hardware accelerator card required
# 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible 64MB hardware accelerated video card and the latest drivers

Supported graphics cards:

-ATi Radeon 9500/9700/9800 series
-ATi Radeon X300/X550/X600/X700/X800/X850/X1300/X1600/X1800 series
-nVidia GeForce 3/Ti/4/Ti series
-nVidia GeForce FX/6/7 series

As you can see, that's a pretty average system there. You can beat that pretty easily, probably for around 500 bucks for the whole system. Including a fancy case.

Here's a good video card for about a hundred.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... ategory=48

Joe88 · Post by **Joe88** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 2:41 am

well if your into buget them maybe pick up 2 HIS x1600 PRO 512MB GDDR2 and crossfire them
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814161020