pc too slow; whats most cost-efective upgrade pls?

[kkkkkk]

after help from here and elsewhere (much thanks) finally got capturing to work on my machine; Hi8 vidcam, thru ancient elsa victory erazor 4mb agp card, on supermicro p6sba motherboard, with celeron 333, 196M Ram, 2 * 40 gig h\d 5400 rpm. I want to save the hi8 and eventually some vhs tapes to archive family footage etc. want to preserve all quality possible, time it totally unimportant, it can run for days..... using vdub (best i found so far) i can only capture at 384 * 288 without dropping frames at what looks like high rate, also picture is blurred by horizontal lines. i tried capturing with uncompressed rgb and with huffyec, neither seemed to help, perhaps hufy led to higher frame rate dropping. is there a software solution? can i load all the tape info onto the hard drive another way, then process slowly later? if i need a hardware solution, whats the real bottleneck here? will upgrading processor/memory/motherboard make all the difference. I hoep it's not the vid card is the problem, cos they seem most expensive..... if it is, then would a new digicam with analogue in and then capture via usb/firewire be best?
thanks
kkkkkk

[wulf109]

Uprade to the fastest CPU your motherboard will support. Make sure DMA transfer mode is tuned on for your HD. Your video card probably needs an upgrade. You can buy a 32MB ATi card for $40.00 these days. You'll be able run a higher resolution on your monitor and get faster screen re-writes. A new motherboard with an AMD CPU would be my next step.

[tonyp12]

You will run in one problem upgrading your 'snail' and that is
format changes.

The case is probably a AT, new motherboards are ATX.

The memory is EDO and the new format is SDRAM/DDR.

So donate to someone you like, or sell it cheap to someone you hate.


And get a new system from the ground up.

[MOVIEGEEK]

I have to agree with tonyp12,save your drives and RAM and get a new CPU/motherboard combo.Here in the US you can get a 1ghz combo for $100.
Try pricewatch.com

[Gee W]

If he has a Celeron 333, then he is already using SDRAM. Either PC100 or PC133. And I am sure there is a 90% probability that he has an ATX system too.

First thing to do is add more RAM. RAM is cheap, get at least 256, 512 if you can afford it. Then get faster Hard Drives. If you are dropping frames, maybe your hard drive is not saving the files fast enough. Upgrade to the newer 7200 RPM drives. Check to see if your motherboard supports UDMA 66 or 100. If it does, check to see if you have a UDMA cable attached to the drive.

You can spend money on these upgrades, cuz you can move them over to a new machine in the future. (Well, maybe not the RAM as new machines are using DDR).

[dilligaf]

That ram maybe pc66, so better budget for 256mb pc133, even better if the new board supports ddr.

[RoopeT]

Dropped frames are due to Celeron333 only in this case. It really doesn't matter if you have 1 GB 800 MHz RIMM if your processor is 333 MHz.

First of all, try capturing with PicVideo MJPEG codec, you might be able to capture at full resolution using quality=19/20 (or even 20/20, which is much more HD expensive).

If this doesn't help, find out how fast processor your MB supports. If you cannot get a faster than ~500 MHz processor, consider bying a new MB+processor.

[SingSing]

One of my PC has a supermicro PB6 motherboard.
It runs a Celeron 800MHz CPU with slot 1 adapter, with 256MB SDRAM.
That is adquate to run capture and tmpgenc.

[SingSing]

Correction. It was a 800MHz pentium II which has much more cache.

[DigiToast]

kkkkkk:
After examining your motherboard and reading up about it on the internet,...Here's the fastest and cheapest option you have with minimal hardware purchasing:

Use this page that I dug up off of yahoo.com:
http://www.cpuscorecard.com/cpuprices/ip3.htm

Look for processors that meet the following requirements:
Bus: 100
Connector: Slot1 or Socket370
Cache: 256@Full (512@half may seem better, but it isn't.. it would take very long to explain, so trust me on this.. and if you really want some simple reasoning, look at all the newer processors and you'll see half isn't used anymore)


Notes:
- If you pick out a Socket370 Processor, you'll have to find a Socket370->Slot1 adapter.
- Make sure that if you have PC66 RAM, that you get rid of it! You'll want to upgrade to a 100FSB (Front Side Bus) Processor, so you'll need to buy PC100 or PC133 (which is backwards compatible)
- Open up your motherboard manual or look at the board and figure out the max clock/CPU speed that you can get at 100FSB. Whatever highest Multiplier you can use * 100 FSB (ie: multiplier 6 and 100 FSB = 600MHz) will be the fastest CPU that you'll be able to stick on the motherboard. Try checking your motherboard manufacturer's web site for updates as well, as sometimes new updates add support for faster processors as well.


SingSing:
Hate to be nitpicky, but I believe that you mean you have a Pentium 3, as Pentium IIs, were never made past 450MHz.