Re: [PLUG] [OT ... umm not really ] Buying New Hardware, Suggestions Please!

[Paul <gyoza@comcast.net>]

McLinux wrote:

> I am planning to upgrade my humble P-III 450 Mhz with P-IV, however I 
> am very much willing to experiment and I have heard that AMD Athlon is 
> doing really great. Due to this I am confused and am seeking advice as 
> which Motherboard, CPU and RAM I should opt for.
>
> My requirement are simple I need some mean CPU that can do MPEG-1/2 
> encoding/decoding fast enough. On my current hardware spec *kino* dies 
> saying there is no enough memory resource available :(. Of course my 
> machine has 128 Mb RAM but I guess that is quite less. Again many a 
> times *mplayer* also grumbles that my system is very slow to play some 
> mpeg files.
>
> I had recently purchased Sony DCR-TRV33E, a firewire card (IEEE 1394). 
> I tried capturing DV movie on my desk through some win application 
> (Since kino dies :( ). I went ahead and tried to convert the DV movie 
> to DVD mpeg-II standard. It seems that to convert a six minute clip, 
> my machine needs to run for 4-6 hours to create the mpeg file. Now 
> thats pretty slow. Hence the need to upgrade.
>
> Any recommendation for multimedia intensive task?

I'm not a multimedia expert, but I can tell you that a 450MHz machine is 
slow and 128MB of RAM is minimal.  Try getting an AMD Athlon XP CPU; for 
under $100 you can go up to an Athlon XP 2700.  Get at least 256MB of 
RAM.  I like DFI motherboards.

An encoder card that can do encoding using it's own hardware will reduce 
the load on the main CPU, significantly from what I've read.

What I would do is this: Check the price curve on CPUs at 
http://www.pricewatch.com/ and see what http://www.tcwo.com/ has to 
offer.  Then, I would consult AMD's website for recommended motherboards 
to go with the CPU, again, giving preference to DFI motherboards.  I 
would also buy 512MB of RAM.

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