Your system will be great for a video and audio workstation. Make sure you
have 500 megs of ram, either Crucial or Kingston. You will probably want
more hard drive space pretty fast once you start working with video, which
devours megabytes like a rouge black hole. Since you popped for a 9800 All
in Wonder, I am guessing you want this also as a gaming box. Video capture
is as good on a 9600 or even a 7500 All in Wonder. They will all do TV, and
video capture equally well. The all use the same drivers. The differences
in the video cards is in 3D graphics performance for gaming, and 3D
rendering or design work. But with a 9800 you are all set for the newest
games.
I would recommend you get an Intel board with a 875 or 865 chipset.
http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/motherbd/index.htm?iid=ipp_desk+boards
I have a Intel865 PERL with a P4 3.06 800MHZ FSB that I use as a audio
Video Media box. But you might as well go with the latest 875 chipset if
you find a board you like. Intel is not for the over clocker, or Nano
cutting tweaker, but for the rest of us, who want ease of use, reliability,
and rock steady stability you won't do better then Intel motherboards.
Three year warranty, a manual written by a native English speaker, great
performance, and ease of use make Intel the Cadillac of motherboards.
Almost every high end board now will come with a really good SoundMax
sound card and it may be all you need.\
Intel boards are a little pricey, and maybe aren't as feature rich as other
manufacturers, but the first time you don't have to spend hours trying to
get your new set up to POST, you won't care about the additional cost.
Intel CPU, Intel Chipset, Intel Motherboard, and Crucial or Kingston RAM...
it doesn't get any better then that. Intel is my first choice followed by ASUS.
Any new motherboard with an AGP slot should support your 9800. Just make
sure you use a quality power supply from either PC Power and Cooling,
Antec, or Enermax. These days, a quality Power Supply is extremely
important. This is particularly true for a cutting edge system like yours.
All the high end Intel motherboards will come with on board Intel SATA
RAID. All you need is the hard drives. If you want to go all out, stay with
Western Digital Raptor 74 GB drives. They are Enterprise drives designed
for servers, with 5 year warranties, that run at 10,000 RPM. But they will
cost you around $225+ apiece.
Put your OS on a non RAID drive, and then do a hardware RAID 0 for
performance, with two more identical drives, for editing and capture. You
don't need the redunancy of a RAID 1 for this use. You could use your 160
for storage, and maybe in a USB2 external enclosure. Make sure you
partition everything NTFS except for maybe the boot partition. A capture
can be 5 to 8 GB and you want to keep this in a single file. NTFS supports
this but FAT 32 only goes to 4GB.
Your Seagate is not a particularly fast drive. Both the Western Digital
high end 72000 RPM, and the Maxtor DiaomondMax out perform it. Seagate,
however, makes a very reliable drive and this would make a nice storage drive.
You can not go dual processor with the P4 you have now. There is no SMP =
Symmetric MultiProcessing support for P4. Xeon is Intel's dual processor.
Yes, they are very good for video editing. I am using a Dual 3.06 Xeon
workstation with a ATI AIW 9600 PRO dual head. But I also have a P4 3.06
800Mhz box that almost does just as well. Of course when encoding the P4 is
always cracking at 100 percent CPU while the Xeon has never gotten above 75
percent, and that only when I am using TMPEnc to encode. Most encoding apps
barely get it up to 40 percent. With SMP you need applications that are
written to support it, and those are hard to find.
What the Xeon can do is a bunch of things at the same time. I can edit
video, record a TV show, get my email and anything else you can think of
simultaneously while I am running 40 to 50 processes. Where I really
notice the difference with the Xeon, over the P4 is with editing. It is
faster and smoother then the P4 box, although the P4 is very fast.
Your P4, installed in XP, with Hyperthreading will appear as Two Processors
in Device Manager and in Task Manager. Hyperthreading will give you around
a 15 percent boost in some applications. For example Ulead's VideoStudio is
specifically written to support P4 with HT and you will notice the
difference when encoding. My 3.06 Xeons have HT and appear as Quad
Processors in Task Manager. One thing you realize very quickly, is that the
bottle neck on high end dual Xeon Workstations, is not in the processors or
the RAM, .... it is the hard drive and the PCI Bus that slows things down.
So, is it worth going to a dual Xeon for what you want to do? The answer is
No. There are lots of negatives. It is very esoteric and a lot more
expensive then a P4 setup. Everything Xeon is different. Special case,
special powersupply, the CPUs have to match, and then they have to match
the motherboards chipset, the ram, the cache size have to be supported by
your motherboard. It is very easy to screw up and make an expensive
mistake. I made a number of them. Xeon was never intended for the end
user. It was created for Servers, and very high end Workstations.
Believe me, the learning curve is steep and expensive. Other negatives are
heat, the thing pumps out heat exactly like one of those hand dryers you
see in a rest room. If you need a room heater it will do the job. And I am
not trying to be funny here.The heat sinks and fans are enormous and are
barely contained in a full tower case. With a couple of exceptions you need
a special over sized, extended case or a Rack Mount server case for Xeon
motherboards. A Xeon Case starts at over $100 without a power supply. Power
Supplies start at around $85. I paid $200 for my PC Power and Cooling
510Xeon PS.
With the additional heat you create another problem.... fan noise. Once the
temperature gets up to about 95 degrees inside the case, the CPU fans
automatically spin up and it sounds like your sitting at your desk, on an
airport run way, next to a DC 10! Remember these things were designed to be
run in locked, air conditioned, server rooms, not in your home office bedroom.
Stay with name brand quality RAM, Power Supply, and motherboard and you
should be set with your P4. But don't be surprised if you have to fool
around with your All in Wonder for a couple of months to get things
straightened out. I have two All in Wonders, and while I like them, it took
me a few months to solve the glitches and figure them out. It is not a easy
learning curve. But then nothing with Video work is.
One thing you should get is a PCI TV Wonder. You can buy a new one = TV
Wonder PRO for around 70 bucks or a used one on Ebay for around 35 dollars.
Installed with your 9800 All in Wonder Pro you will have Multi View = two
turners, picture in picture, ...watch something while recording something
else. When you install Media Manager it will all set up automatically and
it is easy to use. This is too cool, and useful, not to get if you have a
All in Wonder. But don't think you gain anything with the newer TV Wonder
Pro. In this application it makes no difference...The old TV Wonder does
the same job.
I think you will be fine with your setup, good luck with it.
Rode
The NOSPIN Group
http://freepctech.com
At 04:20 PM 5/7/2004, you wrote:
>I've been slowly buying components to build a audio/video work station
>computer. I researched compatibility pretty well except for the
>motherboard which I let a salesman convince me would work. My video card
>is an Ati All-in-wonder 9800 pro. Reading the manual for the motherboard (
>Soyo dragon2), I discovered it doesn't support a 3.3 volt vid card.
>Unfortunately, most online comp stores dont mention voltage unless it's to
>say 1.5v only. Is there some terminology that will tell me this?
>If any of you can recommend a board, I,m all ears!
>I don't know much about "raid arrays" or dual processor boards, so if
>either would benefit my needs, I would like to know.
>Here is a list of the components I have aquired so far;
>Processor; intel p4 3.2 h/t
>Video card: Ati All-in-wonder 9800 pro
>Audio card A Audigy 2 zs platinum pro
>Hard drive: Seagate 160gig ultra ATA/100 7200 rpm
>Misc.: Sony DRU-530A DVD writer
> Sony crv 230A-u cd writer
>Thanks in advance!
>Phillip
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