How powerful should the PC be.....???

[ladieskiller101]

Hi all, I am planning to build or buy one PC. But I am not really good about it, so here is my question. How powerful should the PC be so i can encode or rip a dvd in real time? Can you experts give me a list of things (like what cpu, how much ram, graphic card.....) i should buy to make my pc powerful enough to do that? I also want to edit digital movies too. :D
P.S. I want my computer ranks anywhere under $2,000. :D Thanks in advance!!!

[i_am_dave]

You can do what you want with just about any new computer on the market today like HP, Compaq, or Dell.

I own an HP780n with an HP200i burner and dual 120Gig hard drives.
It has 512Meg and is a P4-1.8Ghz. It takes a little time to do encoding, but since I batch them up and do them at night and while I am at work, it is not really a problem for me.

You did not mention whether or not you want to capture video from an external source or to burn DVDs. These are important thinks to take into account.
A good video card that will allow capture will cost extra. A DVD burner will cost you around $200-$450 depending on what your requirements are.

If I were going to build a system, I would want the following at a minimum:

Motherboard - Support dual P4 processors with hyperthreading capability. Firewire, USB, and Network on the motherboard

At least one Pentium 4 3.06 Ghz or faster with HT (two would be better)

At least 512M of DDR ram

Two 120Gig 7200RMP hard drives (with 8mb cache) - This is a must. One drive for the operating system and applications. One drive for video workspace. My system only had one drive when I purchased it. I afraid I was going to kill it. Adding a second drive spead things up a lot.

CD drive - Any quality drive.

DVD burner that supports all formats - CD-R/RW, DVD +/-R/RW (Sony has a nice one)

A high output power supply

An enclosure with good cooling (you will need it!)

Since I already own a Canpous video capture box, I have no need for a high end video card. I'm sure others here can offer advice on one, I have never researched them.

Don't forget to save $300-$400 for software. You will need to purchase some for editing, encoding, burning.

Good Luck, wish I had $2000 to spend on an upgrade to my system!

[Rond66]

Building Your Own PC
Know-How for Do-It-Yourselfers

http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/20020904/index.html

http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/index.html

[rallynavvie]

I didn't even know there were motherboards out there that support dual HT P4s. Maybe that will have to be the replacement to my dual CPU system.

To encode MPEG in realtime you either need a good hardware MPEG encoder or a processor or processors fast enough to do it with a software encoder like TMPGEnc. The hardware card costs about half what you stated you wanted to spend on a PC and its uses are limited to video work (although VERY useful for video work). Getting a faster processor system helps all sorts of applications. I haven't seen benchmarks between the latest Pentium and a dual Athlon set-up so I can't say for sure. I do know that a dual Athlon 2400 or better should be software encoding at realtime depending on your settings. The cost of a single P4 3.06 GHz is about $375, each Athlon 2400+ MP for a multiprocessor system is $150. Depending on the board you get the Pentium is going to cost you more. Of course the FSB on the Pentium is quite a bit faster I'm not sure where this makes a difference in mulitmedia work. Anyone help me out on this? And does a dual CPU system effectively double the FSB capabilities of the single CPU? That would be good to know as well.

However the advantage of the faster single processor is for most apps that don't utilize dual CPUs it runs faster. On the other hand the dual CPU allows more apps to be running at once without much slowdown, though I thought the new P4 HT is supposed to get around this.

[i_am_dave]

I thought ASUS had one, but on visiting their website, I couldn't find it.

However, I did find this one....Very Nice

ASUS

[kernow_warrior]

Check out....
http://www.digital-forums.com/dvd2dvdr/

although more relative to the actual dvd copying process itself, it does contain some hardware info, pay special attention to the fact you need to have your HD in NTFS mode not FAT32