I need opinions and thoughts on upgrading a 9600 and if it is worth the effort.
The 8600/9600 have built in A/V capture ports. Having owned one, I know that the stock 8600/9600 series video capture rates were too low to do any sort of quality video work with. But I got to thinking that since most of the capturing work was offloaded to the CPU, what if the machine was upgraded significantly. I was thinking something along the lines of a 800mhz G4 daughterboard and an IDE card supporting ATA 100 or 133. The logic goes something like this: Part of the bottleneck is raw speed, which the G4 upgrade would take care of. The other part is what I believe too much being handled on the by the I/O chipset. On the 8600 (or any 3 slot PCI mac) there is only one arbitrator chipset which controls all sorts of functions including PCI bus, SCSI, ADB and I imagine the RCA video in and out. On the 9600 the 3 lower PCI slots are controlled by their own arbitrator chipset which serves no other purpose than to control these slots. I would put the IDE card and with a ATA 133 7200 RPM drive in one of these. Finally, I would fill the RAM slots to capacity (1.5gig). I started to think about going this route after checking prices on video capture cards for the Mac. The ATI Xclaim and All-In-Wonder capture at to low a resolution and rate to be useable, same with the Formac ProTV. The Formac ProTV Stereo would probably do the job (even with a lesser G4 upgrade), but the only place I could find one want US$400. After that, it seems the only cards left are high-end capture cards which range US$1000 and up. Having a machine that is devoted to chunking on video and editing all day wouldn't be too bad, especially considering that it may cost just as much, if not more, to get a card to do the same thing. Does anyone think my logic is sound? I certainly would welcome any comments or thoughts before I sink some serious money into it. Thanks in advance to those who help. Take care, Aaron Oechsli __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com -- PCI-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PCI-PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/pci-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/pci-powermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
