What is the best system for Me?

[4A-GE]

Hi, I plan to build a new computer and I need to know what kind of system should I build to archieve best quality capturing using a ATI AIW Radeon or Radeon 64 VIVO. My price range is limited to $1000. However any suggestion is nice. Please give me a full specs. Also I want to know which drivers should I use and my requirement is that I'll be able to do VCD quality or SVCD on the fly without any problems and be able to play it on my Pioneer DV-434. Any software suggestion would be nice. Thanks.

[patrickm]

skip the radeon. get the AiW 128 or 128 Pro. they use the same capture hardware (rage theater chip) as the radeon, and you're not overpaying for 3d technology. VCD on the fly isn't as good as SVCD, which is actually pretty good. there's a little blockiness in very bright or very dark solid colored scenes, but basically the sharpness is very good with just some minor JPEG artifacting. the drivers you want are 4.12.6292 and MMC 6.3 and 7.1. (mostly 7.1 but 6.3 has part of the vfw capture driver).

an athlon 1.2/266 on an asus k7m266 motherboard with 256Mb DDR should do pretty well. those boards also carry onboard IDE RAID/ATA100 controllers. that package might run about $350-400. the asus A7V133 would be an alternate board if the DDR memory doesn't matter to you. DON'T get either one with onboard sound. the turtle beach santa cruz is a 6 channel analog sound card for around $80, or if you want to go cheap http://www.compgeeks.com has an aureal sq1500 with a digital out for $10. it's an older card, but still decent stuff. better than SB Live.

any hard drive should be ATA100, and 7200 RPM if you're capturing to it. use more than one drive, one for the OS and programs and one to capture to.