?s on Building a PC

[Kalium]

The Itaniums are all 64bit procesors, so are all the newest Xeons. Which was a lil stupid on their part cause that basically just killed off their Itanium processor line. *shrugs*

Intel is known for many things. Smart buisness decisions are not always among them. Neither is technical superiority, or affiliating themselves with more or less ethical corporations.

[kichigai-jin]

Quick question, how well does the radion 9800 perform?

I am currently in the "making the new AMV PC" quandry, and I am debating what video I/O device to invest in. Currently I am useing a Matrox RT2000 that I got at the turn of the century. I have it in an AMD 1.5 machine w/ 1GB ram, but the poor thing was meant for a PIII so I cannot use its analog video mode any more (DV only.. yeah twist my arm) Anyways, I am slowly piecing together an Athelon FX-51 64bit machine on a gigabyte board with a couple of sata 70m raptors and hopefully a gig of dual corsiar or another type of ram a friend reccomended as faster and better. I was going to get the radion 9800 for this machine, BUUT... I have an upgrade offer from Matrox that I can take advantage of for an X100 card with Priemiere pro and a few other software packages with it.

What do you all recomend? Thanks --AMG

[shirohamada]

PCI express ?
will you be upgrading your videocard with the flow of new games ?
if you do get a motherboard with one.

i see most of them (or are all of them ?) are ditching IDE.

http://www.pricewatch.com/

[Wheee_It's_Me!]

Quick question, how well does the radion 9800 perform?

I am currently in the "making the new AMV PC" quandry, and I am debating what video I/O device to invest in. Currently I am useing a Matrox RT2000 that I got at the turn of the century. I have it in an AMD 1.5 machine w/ 1GB ram, but the poor thing was meant for a PIII so I cannot use its analog video mode any more (DV only.. yeah twist my arm) Anyways, I am slowly piecing together an Athelon FX-51 64bit machine on a gigabyte board with a couple of sata 70m raptors and hopefully a gig of dual corsiar or another type of ram a friend reccomended as faster and better. I was going to get the radion 9800 for this machine, BUUT... I have an upgrade offer from Matrox that I can take advantage of for an X100 card with Priemiere pro and a few other software packages with it.

What do you all recomend? Thanks --AMG

First of all, don't just buy the fastest memory on the market. Look up the specific model of motherboard you're going to buy and get whatever it's capable of. For example I have PC-3200 memory, even though my board is only capable of handling PC-2400, so basically it's like trying to drive fast in a school zone. Faster memory doesn't mean that it won't work if it can't handle it, it just means it won't make full use of it (ie a waste of money).

As far as video cards I mostly just have experience with Radeons so I can't really give you too much advice comparison wise. Truth be told, I went with the Radeon card because of the color, the same reason I went with the MSI motherboard. Red interior, silver shell. The next system I build will probably have a black shell with green interior in order to give myself more options. ^_^

[kichigai-jin]

Let me clarify a bit... I do have most of this machine already. I have the CPU, a k8nnxp-940 motherboard, and 2 74gig SATA WD raptors. The MB can handle DDR400 PC3200 ram, but dang is it a hit in the wallet. Currently it is operational with spare parts for the video card and ram, its just in a holding pattern till I can come up with the rest.

I wasn't intending on doing any gaming with this machine, I'm building it to do video production and animation work (2D and 3D).


Wheee_It's_Me!, I guess I was wondering how you felt about the Radion card. Have you had good luck with it, or have you had any trouble or bad proccessing time with it. I understand that it won't be an "on the fly" type card, but then again were not talking about a major investment like a Video Toaster machine or an Avid. What it comes down to is I need to make a decision between the two video input cards. Now the Radion is what, $300 or so? The Matrox X100 is $599 with the minimum package, and its $749 with a software bundle of an upgrade to Premiere Pro, and full versions of Adobe Encore DVD and Audition. I have Premiere 6 to upgrade from. Also my footage from prievious AMVs will be compatable. I guess I'm answering my own question, but does it justify the wait for the x100 if its better? Ofcourse this is all pending if Microsoft will get off its butt and release XP64. Thanks for your input --AMG

[Scintilla]

Okay, should have asked: has Intel released a <i>consumer-grade</i> 64-bit processor yet?

o_O

The Itaniums are all 64bit procesors, so are all the newest Xeons. Which was a lil stupid on their part cause that basically just killed off their Itanium processor line. *shrugs*

I said <b>consumer-grade</b>... I don't care about server and business solutions. Looking at the Intel website, and searching for "Xeon", I'm getting the clear message that the Xeon is considered server-grade.

[NicholasDWolfwood]

Let me clarify a bit... I do have most of this machine already. I have the CPU, a k8nnxp-940 motherboard, and 2 74gig SATA WD raptors. The MB can handle DDR400 PC3200 ram, but dang is it a hit in the wallet. Currently it is operational with spare parts for the video card and ram, its just in a holding pattern till I can come up with the rest.

I wasn't intending on doing any gaming with this machine, I'm building it to do video production and animation work (2D and 3D).


Wheee_It's_Me!, I guess I was wondering how you felt about the Radion card. Have you had good luck with it, or have you had any trouble or bad proccessing time with it. I understand that it won't be an "on the fly" type card, but then again were not talking about a major investment like a Video Toaster machine or an Avid. What it comes down to is I need to make a decision between the two video input cards. Now the Radion is what, $300 or so? The Matrox X100 is $599 with the minimum package, and its $749 with a software bundle of an upgrade to Premiere Pro, and full versions of Adobe Encore DVD and Audition. I have Premiere 6 to upgrade from. Also my footage from prievious AMVs will be compatable. I guess I'm answering my own question, but does it justify the wait for the x100 if its better? Ofcourse this is all pending if Microsoft will get off its butt and release XP64. Thanks for your input --AMG

A Radeon is a video card. It is NOT a real-time rendering card like the Matrox X100 or the Pinnacle DV500.

[Wheee_It's_Me!]

I said <b>consumer-grade</b>... I don't care about server and business solutions. Looking at the Intel website, and searching for "Xeon", I'm getting the clear message that the Xeon is considered server-grade.

Only because they don't sell them in box PeeCee's down at Staples. I consider Xeons to be consumer grade while I consider Itaniums business grade...I don't really include people buying crap down at Best Buy so they can play solitair and e-mail their great aunt mildred. *shrugs*

That's just my opinion.

[Wheee_It's_Me!]

Wheee_It's_Me!, I guess I was wondering how you felt about the Radion card. Have you had good luck with it, or have you had any trouble or bad proccessing time with it. I understand that it won't be an "on the fly" type card, but then again were not talking about a major investment like a Video Toaster machine or an Avid. What it comes down to is I need to make a decision between the two video input cards. Now the Radion is what, $300 or so? The Matrox X100 is $599 with the minimum package, and its $749 with a software bundle of an upgrade to Premiere Pro, and full versions of Adobe Encore DVD and Audition. I have Premiere 6 to upgrade from. Also my footage from prievious AMVs will be compatable. I guess I'm answering my own question, but does it justify the wait for the x100 if its better? Ofcourse this is all pending if Microsoft will get off its butt and release XP64. Thanks for your input --AMG

I haven't had any problems with it, keep in mind though that the graphics card doesn't ALWAYS have very much to do with, well anything really. Premiere won't run/encode any faster whether you've got Radeon 9000 or a Radeon 9800 for example. Most applications RARELY make good use out of your hardwares capability and a lot of software is designed to make better use of certain hardware and not others. This is why when they do benchmarking tests an Intel processor will beat the crap out of an AMD processor and vice versa, it's not that one chip is really "better" per se, it's just that the applications they used to benchmark were built to make better use out of one processor over the other.

I haven't done any extensive testing or experimentation, but I do know that as far as rendering is concerned using Maya, 3DS Max and Bryce 5 that there is NO speed increase between a Radeon 9000 and a Radeon9800. I believe the difference between the two cards would be better seen in gaming circumstances than rendering circumstances.

Again though, keep in mind I haven't done any definitive testing and I've only worked with Radeons.

[madmag9999]

well i havent read this whole thread becouse my dsl got cannceld and my 56k modem keeps disconnectiong but building a system is fairly easy. i have a amd 2800+ is 1 gig 333 pc 2700 OEM memory a ati radeon 9600pro with 256mb ddr 1 80gig 7200rpm hdd 1 120gig 7200rpm hdd a dvd burner cd burner dvd player and it all cost around $1000. and this system preformes wonderfuly, i play ut2k4 on the highest settings with no lag and it edits really well to. so for about $1000 u can have a really good comp.