On Saturday 13 September 2003 02:46 pm, Anne Wilson wrote: > I want to build a box whose main purpose would be video capture from > camcorder and vhs, editing, and burning to either vcd or dvd. All > funds available should go into the most essential bits for that > purpose, so I'd like some opinions, please. > > Mobo - I'm torn between Asus A7v8X-X and Soltek SL-KT400-A4C. Specs > are very similar. Both have Via KT400/VT8235 chipsets. > > Asus has 8x agp and Soltek has 4x agp > > Asus has Realtek 6-chanel codec, which I take to mean on-board sound, > and Soltek has 6-ch AC'97 Audio. I've always avoided on-board audio > in the past, disabling it and putting in a card. Is that still worth > the effort/expense? > > Asus also offers on-board lan. I think these have been troublesome? > > Graphics cards - since I don't do gaming I've not been into the latest > thing in video cards, so I don't know what is significant and what is > hype. I'm looking at 128MB XFX Geforce4 MX44- or FX5200. I could go > higher if there's a real advantage. Any thoughts? > > Any comments about anything I haven't mentioned that is significant in > this scenario? > > Anne
Anne: I've been using the Asus board for the past three months. (Athlon XP 2500+, 512 mb Corsair DDR). Nice, but not a 10. There are a couple of minor issues: First, the onboard sound sorta works, the issue being very low volume -- I have to turn the speaker amp volume full up to get a listenable level. (And that took some fiddling with drivers and mixer settings.) The same speakers rattled glassware at anything much over half volume in my previous setup. I plan to install the old sound card and give that a try when my round tuit finally gets here. Second, there is only one serial port. This is probably not a big deal for most folks, but I've got both an external modem and a UPS, and each of them wants a serial port. The modem won. (My own fault -- I thought that some kind of law required that all PC's had to have two serial ports.) Haven't tried the LAN port, so I can't help you there. And yeah, AGP 1 cards don't work, so I had to replace my ancient Matrox G200 Millenium with an MSI 64 mb nVidia GeForce card. Frankly, I'm not sure that has been an improvement for the ordinary desktop stuff I do. Warning: These things boot very, very quickly. Getting into the BIOS requires the reflexes of a gamer in the 14 to 18 year age group. -- cmg
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