New comp, going to be doing alot of video capture, editing, the amd athlonxp 2600 2.1

[J.J.]

here is what a friend came up with, what do you think?
processor:
amd athlon xp 2600+ 2.13gHz 333fsb oem
board:
Giga Byte GA-7AXP ULTRA VIA 8235 KT400 (266/333/400) MHz DDR ATX
memory:
512MB PC2700 DDR333
Video card:
ATi Radeon 9700 8x AGP Pro 128MBDDR with DVI & TV


I do plan on taking advantage of the RAID 0 state by getting another maxtor 80 gb 7200 HD, but 4 now, will use the one and the original 8.4gb maxtor that ol' Betsy came with over three years ago.

Is it true that the AMD / Via inability to play well with each other when doing graphics has been fixed? my friend swears so, but i have heard maybe not? - all I know is that i would go to Dell and back b4 dealing with all the agonizing hangs and crashes and blue screens that i get when doing photo work now. I eagerly await your learned opines... [img]smile.gif[/img]

[andrewas]

I would replace the mobo with an ASUS A7N8X, based on the Nforce2 chipset - significantly more powerful.

Problem is you wont be able to set up a RAID on the IDE channels, you would need to aqueire SATA hard drives (limit of two since there are only two SATA ports) which are expensive. But other than that it outperforms the KT400 chipset in every way.

Put 1Gb of pc2700 RAM into it. For heavy video work 512Mb is probably adequate, but RAM is cheap.

Up till now Ive always recommended Geforce cards over Radeons, but the performance has always been close. GeforceFX changes that though, that card is overclocked out the box. Worrying. So stick with the Radeon.

[Harkoliar]

just bumpin..

there may be other suggestions which may be better.. personally i dont know lots about motherboards and thier speicifications only the basics. but i know is that intel and amd is going to release another new chipset. you might want to wait for it since it may bring all the prices down with it.

[Thoran]

I've not heard great things about IDE raid solutions performance wise, IMO unless you can find a good benchmark of the boards of interest (check the hardware sites) IMO I wouldn't even worry about IDE raid... just get a good fast BIG drive and backup regularly.

I'm assuming since you're buying Athlon that your price sensitive (like the rest of us), so put your cash where it will do the most good... get at least a gig of memory, good hdd, and good editing software/hw. I'm going to guess you're going DV... so make sure your setup can deal with the DV's fixed readout over firewire (a couple meg a second if memory serves), otherwise you'll drop frames. If you're going analog don't skimp on the capture card and don't assume you can use the Radeon's capability unless you're just doing this for fun. I have yet to see a "built in" capture ability on a video card that was good for anything but goofing around, although perhaps the Radeon is different (something to check into).