Maximum PC

Many years ago, I set out to build my first system, and I decided to go top of the line. So I built the biggest and best system available at the time - A Pentium Pro 200. For those of you old enough to remember, you know that this was an evolutionary dead end, leaving me with zero upgrade path. Since then, I have shot for good but not the best, leaving room to grow.

With that in mind, I'm getting ready to build a new system, as the one I have is getting long in the tooth (Abit KT7A with an Athlon XP 2100+ clocked at 2 GHz).

I play zero games, and my main power requirement is video editing - taking home camcorder tapes, capturing, editing and creating DVDs from them. As such, I have decided on building around an Intel 550 chip, the 3.4 GHz Prescott. I'm an Athlon fan, but all the testing I have seen from various online sites (Tom's Hardware, Sharkey Extreme, etc) has the Intel chips at a clear advantage in video rendering - it would take an A64 3800+ to match the 550 from the tests I've seen, which is twice the price.

So, I'm looking at a Socket T board, which means PCI-Express. And we've finally come to the question - with my complete lack of gaming requirements, is there any reason to get anything better than an ATI X300? I know you gaming guys gag at the thought of the lowly X300, but do I really need any more than this?

Thanks in advance, guys and gals.

Tim

the x300 would be fine, in your case.

That card should be quite nice for your purposes, thanx for pointing it out to me! If you don't game, I don't think you'd need anything more.

If you're not going to game with that machine why get a PCI-X card?

You could get a regular PCI based video card and save some money.

If you're using firewire or USB for video capturing your camcorder then the video card itself doesn't need to be anything fancy.

I hadn't really considered that - most of the motherboards I've been looking at have a minimal number of PCI slots, and I figured I should save those for other uses. Then again, given how much is integrated into most of these motherboards these days, I'm not sure how many slots I need in the first place.

Of course, it doesn't look like it is a great big savings, in the overall system scheme of things - 30 bucks or so for a PCI card with 8MB, or 70 bucks for a PCIE with 128MB. I'm trying not to sweat a few bucks here and there.

Thanks for your help, it's something to consider.

Tim