Please critique this new capture system

[joejackson]

I'm about ready to spring for a new home computer, for which the key application likely to stress the system will be video capture from our Hi8 camcorder and encoding of VCDs/SVCDs for playing on a DVD player. Quality of the finished VCDs/SVCDs are more important than speed. Gaming and playing DVDs or watching TV on this system are NOT important. (I've already got a TV and DVD player in the family room... I am seriously considering a system with the following configuration:

Pentium 4 1.8 GHz (Socket 423)
Intel 850 chipset
400 MHZ front side bus
4X AGP video slot
Ultra ATA-100 hard disk controller
256 Mb PC800 RDRAM
60 BB Hard disk (7200 RPM)
Soundblaster Ensoniq AudioPCI 128 Voice
CD ROM drive (i will add CDRW from my existing system)
no display (trying to decide between 17" CRT or 15" LCD)
MS Windows XP Home Edition (I'll add dual boot and Windows 98 and use whichever OS works best for video capture)

(This system will run me slightly under $1100 at a silicon valley PC shop)

My current thoughts and concerns with this:

1. Key Concern - Video card: I think I'll replace the video card with an ATI Radeon. The ATI looks like a popular solution, with some driver problems but a lot of non ATI resources and solutions to common problems. And no other card seems to be free of driver problems either, so my thinking is get one that at least some people have got working fine for this application.

2. Processor: 1.8 P4 seems to have most bang for the buck (2.0 GHz are a big jump in price) And a fast processor and enough memory seem to be a better tradeoff than the cost of true hardware MPEG encoding cards/devices. Maybe...

3. RDRAM vs SDRAM: Would a somewhat cheaper system with SDRAM memory (on a 133 front bus) be as good or better for video capture?

4. Motherboard chip set: any known problems with this chipset, especially for video capture requirments?

5. Sound card: anything likely to work better without costing an arm and a leg?

Anyone recently made any similar decision? What do you think?

[stanwebber]

save yourself some headaches....dual-boot win98se & get a cheap pci tv-tuner(even if you still opt for the ati radeon). raw cpu processing power will be the limiting factor in terms of encoding speed, so i doubt the faster ram will impact at all. as to soundcard selection there are no guarantees for capture performance short of manual testing(old isa cards will even outperform some high-end pci cards). how long are your captures likely to be? i recently added 40gb for 80gb total & could kick myself that i didn't go higher