Intel D975XBX (Bad Axe)

[AHLnut]

WOW That card KICKS AZZ!!!!!

[Sandog]

It certainly appears to. This card has some new technology in it with the 'Ring' bus. It uses 3.0 Shader model now so that will carry it on for a long time. I do not plan on giving the new NVidia card any thought next March/April as I paid enough for this card. Hopefully for NVidia though it won't just be a refresh of the 7800GTX at .90nm as that will not be enough to beat this card I believe. I won't say it's impossible that there won't be a Leadtek G71 card in my sights but I doubt it. After this game rig is done I plan on just upgrading to a Conroe later and that is all this year for the desktop. Then it will be on to a Centrino Core Duo notebook.

[Zeppelin]

Originally Posted by Sandog

<snip> After this game rig is done I plan on just upgrading to a Conroe later and that is all this year for the desktop. Then it will be on to a Centrino Core Duo notebook.

Sounds like a nice VC hope it keeps you happy for a while. I will admit to not following all the Intel Hype too closely since Prescott was such a farce, so what is the big deal with Conroe?

Notebooks Roooole! for many things.

[pointreyes]

The big deal about the Conroe? Goodbye P4 and Netburst technology.

[emgarf]

I'd be more excited about an ATI card if they had Linux driver support.

[pointreyes]

Originally Posted by emgarf

I'd be more excited about an ATI card if they had Linux driver support.

Unfortunately before they can do that, we need to wait for them to provide better Windows support.

[emgarf]

Originally Posted by pointreyes

Unfortunately before they can do that, we need to wait for them to provide better Windows support.

Yeah, my last ATI card was an All-In-Wonder 9700... with each (Windows) driver release, some old bugs would get fixed and an equal number of new bugs would appear.

One of the reasons I use Intel-branded motherboards is for the rock-solid stability; I just never have mysterious issues with them. The same has been true for my video cards since I started buying NVidia cards using the NVidia reference designs.

[pointreyes]

The AIW video cards are the vilest, most evil, meanest creation that ATi has ever come up with. Never again will I use an AIW. ATi has borked me enough times with those nasty cards. Poor analog TV Tuners for antenna tuning, miserable support for certain OSes which other TV Tuners don't have a limitation on, 5 to 12 step processes to find out that you might have to start all over to get the stupid MMC to work or kinda of work. Anytime a new piece of 'software' came from ATi for the AIW, I cringed at the thought of installing the version before that version. The only good thing about the AIW, it taught me patience in making an image backup since I invariably had to recover the image to get the system working correctly again.

[Sandog]

Originally Posted by pointreyes

The big deal about the Conroe? Goodbye P4 and Netburst technology.

And Hello 14 stage pipelines (Northwood has 20), 4 way execution core (whatever that means; it's good), 533 or 667 FSB, plus 4MB of L2 cache. I've used a Pentium M 1.9GHz in a notebook and it was fast and smooth. The Conroe is based off of the notebook chips and tweaked for the desktop. It will be a very good chip.

[Sandog]

Originally Posted by emgarf

I'd be more excited about an ATI card if they had Linux driver support.

I don't know about LINUX but while I was shopping today, ATI's website showed Vista drivers. I take that to be 64bit drivers.

[Sandog]

Originally Posted by pointreyes

Unfortunately before they can do that, we need to wait for them to provide better Windows support.

Actually there have been a couple of analysis where ATI drivers are better than NVidia's. They are more stable. I think they came out with another video driver analysis recently because of the new CAT 6.1's. Anyway, I do not doubt peoples driver problems. I have a game glitch but both ATI and NVidia have it so it is the games fault but NVidia is worse, they show the game terrain as green lol. Other than that I do not have a driver issue with either sets of drivers and I've been using NVidia for a long time now. As far as CCC, that has come along since if first came out just a short while ago and MS .net Framework? Better get use to it.

I have no experience with ATI AIW cards but I realized if I wanted a solid tuner card Hauppage was the way to go, not ATI. Although ATI used the same Phillips tuner as Hauppage I believe, the onboard encoder chip was not as good. A simple tool I used to select my video encoder card was to look at the minimum CPU requirements. With Hauppage it is like a P4 1.6GHz, with ATI it is not. More CPU clocks are required for software encoding.

[Zeppelin]

Originally Posted by pointreyes

The AIW video cards are the vilest, most evil, meanest creation that ATi has ever come up with. Never again will I use an AIW. ATi has borked me enough times with those nasty cards. Poor analog TV Tuners for antenna tuning, miserable support for certain OSes which other TV Tuners don't have a limitation on, 5 to 12 step processes to find out that you might have to start all over to get the stupid MMC to work or kinda of work. Anytime a new piece of 'software' came from ATi for the AIW, I cringed at the thought of installing the version before that version. The only good thing about the AIW, it taught me patience in making an image backup since I invariably had to recover the image to get the system working correctly again.

Why don't you tell us what you really think Just kidding

I have seen some brand new ATI AIW AGP cards for reasonable prices of late and was debating utilizing one for video input. After reading your comments, I guess they are out and besides, they cost more than I want to invest in this project. We have what feels like 100s and 100s of VHS tapes. Compacting them to DVD size seems to make sense. I have no clue how to do this, at least not yet. Since this vidoe stuff seems to be your hobby i thought I would run this by you. Here is what I think my requirements are. I don't want to do anything fancy.

1. A way to input video and audio. RCA jacks OK as VCRs are not SVHS.

2. Computer has a decent sound card, so I guess I could run the sound in through that if I had to. Already have stereo RCA to mini plug cable.

3. Lots of episodes are on different tapes. Want to be able to put episodes in order on DVD.

4. Want to be able to remove commercials.

5. Want to be able to add titles and chapters. Each episode would have its own chapter that is selectable on playback.

6. Have a dual layer burner already, ready to be switched into box, not had the time to play with yet.

7. I do not want to invest any real money in buying hardware or software as this is not on my high priority list. Just want to turn some off air TV into DVD.

8. The base computer is 3.2EE with 2GB RAM. An IDE disk contains the OS and programs. The swap file is the only item on the two 80 Gb drives set up as RAID0. (I can substitute two 160 Gb disks from another box if the two 80s are not enough.) With that type of capacity I guess I am not too concerned with compressing the video and audio when it is input into the computer.

Let me have some thoughts and ideas on this subject please.

Thanks,

Zepp

[Sandog]

Originally Posted by Zeppelin

Sounds like a nice VC hope it keeps you happy for a while. I will admit to not following all the Intel Hype too closely since Prescott was such a farce, so what is the big deal with Conroe?

Notebooks Roooole! for many things.

I'm a notebook rooky but it looks like I picked a good time to jump in this year.

[Zeppelin]

Originally Posted by Sandog

I'm a notebook rooky but it looks like I picked a good time to jump in this year.

I have had one since the 486 days. Once you have one you really can't live without it. Many software packages allow you install on a desktop and a mobile unit as long as both are not operated at the same time. Not have word open on both the notebook and the desktop at the same time. So the additional expense of updating is not usually a double whammy.

Enjoy.

[AHLnut]

Originally Posted by Zeppelin

Why don't you tell us what you really think Just kidding

I have seen some brand new ATI AIW AGP cards for reasonable prices of late and was debating utilizing one for video input. After reading your comments, I guess they are out and besides, they cost more than I want to invest in this project. We have what feels like 100s and 100s of VHS tapes. Compacting them to DVD size seems to make sense. I have no clue how to do this, at least not yet. Since this vidoe stuff seems to be your hobby i thought I would run this by you. Here is what I think my requirements are. I don't want to do anything fancy.

1. A way to input video and audio. RCA jacks OK as VCRs are not SVHS.

2. Computer has a decent sound card, so I guess I could run the sound in through that if I had to. Already have stereo RCA to mini plug cable.

3. Lots of episodes are on different tapes. Want to be able to put episodes in order on DVD.

4. Want to be able to remove commercials.

5. Want to be able to add titles and chapters. Each episode would have its own chapter that is selectable on playback.

6. Have a dual layer burner already, ready to be switched into box, not had the time to play with yet.

7. I do not want to invest any real money in buying hardware or software as this is not on my high priority list. Just want to turn some off air TV into DVD.

8. The base computer is 3.2EE with 2GB RAM. An IDE disk contains the OS and programs. The swap file is the only item on the two 80 Gb drives set up as RAID0. (I can substitute two 160 Gb disks from another box if the two 80s are not enough.) With that type of capacity I guess I am not too concerned with compressing the video and audio when it is input into the computer.

Let me have some thoughts and ideas on this subject please.

Thanks,

Zepp

I use a Pinnacle PVR card along with my sound card to capture VHS tapes. There are several software titles that capture for you. The ones I have used are Pinnacle 9 and Nero Vision Express. The Pinnacle is real easy, that is if the program doesnt crash on you, LOL!! The Nero does a great job, also. Nero was easier for me to include menus. I'm sure piontreyes has more suggestions. Kepp in mind though, the quality will AT BEST be what the tape plays like now. Also, SVHS was FAR superior to me to capture from. The RCA hookup for video isn't that goos at all. Very noticable difference between the 2. Maybe a friend has a VCR you could borrow with SVHS? Or pick up one cheap.