New System

[bob the builder]

I am planning on building a new system for video capture and I'd like others to review my config and tell me if it is valid or not.

The system will also be used for DSS smartcard emulation which will take up a great ammount of the cpu time all the time. It currently is taking 80 to 100 percent of the cpu time of an AMD K-6 2 300.

With the new system I expect to run my current emulation application while capturing video at SVCD quality directly to mpeg format. I am also expecting to use my television as a monitor from the bios level on up.


Here is what I am planning on for the new system.
ATI All In Wonder 128 (Will this display video through the Svideo at BIOS)
AMD Duron 800 MHz
250 MB ram
some reletively quiet 7500 RPM IDE disk.

As you might have guessed my goal is to have a minimalist and inexpensive box while keeping the system quiet.


Thanks in advance.
btb

[LeeBear]

If you're going to be capturing trying to do any type of multitasking with your system is a bad idea, you'll get drop frames. Windows does not exactly multitask very well regardless of CPU speed. Which comes to the next question, why a Duron 800 MHz? That's a fairly ancient CPU, you're much better going for a Athlon XP. With a 2000+ CPU going for less then $100 there's really no reason to go for a Duron. If that's too much go for a 1600+ CPU instead, they go for about $60. The larger cache and higher FSB speed will give you much better performance then the Duron. For the video card, the All-In-Wonder should be fine, except I don't think it'll display at the BIOS level. Actually I don't know of any video card that will do that since the BIOS only initialize the VGA mode of the card and it's up to the drivers (in windows) to turn on the extra features like TV-out.

My suggest for you is to build a computer for the video capturing and get an Atmega card of something for your DSS emulation.

-LeeBear