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I am looking to either upgrade or upgrade to a newer computer suitable for lossless video capture, and making DVDs. A friend of mine offered me $600 bucks for my current computer (Bought in 2001). Here are the stats:



It has a CD burner, and firewire ports, and a new graphics accelerator card (PNY Verto).

Would this be a good deal, or should I upgrade the one I have?

Getting $600 for a 3 year old computer is damned good.

Dump it NOW unless you're planning on keeping this friend

Lord Poe wrote:I am looking to either upgrade or upgrade to a newer computer suitable for lossless video capture, and making DVDs. A friend of mine offered me $600 bucks for my current computer (Bought in 2001). Here are the stats:

[+img]http://h4h.com/louis/compinfo.png[/img]

It has a CD burner, and firewire ports, and a new graphics accelerator card (PNY Verto).

Would this be a good deal, or should I upgrade the one I have?

Take the money!

I bought my computer for about $700CAD and here's what I got:

Athlon 2400+
256MB RAM
Two hard drives totalling 100GB
Radeon 9200+
Two CD Burners

Thanks, guys!

Lord Poe wrote:I am looking to either upgrade or upgrade to a newer computer suitable for lossless video capture, and making DVDs. A friend of mine offered me $600 bucks for my current computer (Bought in 2001). Here are the stats:



It has a CD burner, and firewire ports, and a new graphics accelerator card (PNY Verto).

Would this be a good deal, or should I upgrade the one I have?

I'd say that if you can get rid of it for $600, do it. I made my cpu for about $600 and its strong enough even now to run doom 3 on a high setting when it comes out.

Azazel wrote:I'd say that if you can get rid of it for $600, do it. I made my cpu for about $600 and its strong enough even now to run doom 3 on a high setting when it comes out.

Sounds impressive! What exactly should I look for in a multimedia computer for lots of video capturing, editing, special effects, and DVD burning?

I'll buy from you for $300... bout what it's worth

Sell it!

Lord Poe wrote:

Azazel wrote:I'd say that if you can get rid of it for $600, do it. I made my cpu for about $600 and its strong enough even now to run doom 3 on a high setting when it comes out.

Sounds impressive! What exactly should I look for in a multimedia computer for lots of video capturing, editing, special effects, and DVD burning?

I highly suggest ibuypower.com ... seriously, their prices are just a tad bit more than building the computer yourself, in some cases, and you can get Windows bundled with it (I can see from the shots you're a windows user) for cheaper than a self built computer!

I suggest you start from the Athlon XP configurer http://www.ibuypower.com/ibp.net/store/ ... aspx?mid=1

$731 will get you...

A very cool case with see through side panels
Athlon XP 2800+ (better than 2.8 ghz Pentium 4)
500 watt power supply (good for gaming)
CPU fan, CPU heatsink, + 2 extra fans (counting fan on power supply, thats 4 fans total)
Built in LAN
USB 2.0
AGP 8x
512 MB DDR RAM
256 MB Radeon 9600 XT (thats right, XT) w/TV-out and DVI
80 gig hard drive
DVD-RW (whoo!)
600 watt 3 peice speaker system
Floppy drive
keyboard
mouse

Not bad at all

Praxis wrote:

Lord Poe wrote:

Azazel wrote:I'd say that if you can get rid of it for $600, do it. I made my cpu for about $600 and its strong enough even now to run doom 3 on a high setting when it comes out.

Sounds impressive! What exactly should I look for in a multimedia computer for lots of video capturing, editing, special effects, and DVD burning?

I highly suggest ibuypower.com ... seriously, their prices are just a tad bit more than building the computer yourself, in some cases, and you can get Windows bundled with it (I can see from the shots you're a windows user) for cheaper than a self built computer!

I suggest you start from the Athlon XP configurer http://www.ibuypower.com/ibp.net/store/ ... aspx?mid=1

$731 will get you...

A very cool case with see through side panels
Athlon XP 2800+ (better than 2.8 ghz Pentium 4)
500 watt power supply (good for gaming)
CPU fan, CPU heatsink, + 2 extra fans (counting fan on power supply, thats 4 fans total)
Built in LAN
USB 2.0
AGP 8x
512 MB DDR RAM
256 MB Radeon 9600 XT (thats right, XT) w/TV-out and DVI
80 gig hard drive
DVD-RW (whoo!)
600 watt 3 peice speaker system
Floppy drive
keyboard
mouse

Not bad at all

Couldn't you get a low end Athlon 64 for a little more? Also, he's multimedia oriented, so hyperthreading on Intel would help.

My PC has worse specs than that (though 4 times the amount of RAM).

I retract my above statement, since you can *always* get something better for a little more.

The Athlon 64s started at around $799...
The P4's cost fifty to a hundred more than than the Athlons in most cases...

Praxis, you might want to mention the brand names when you post specs.

Getting back on topic here, heres something I whipped up real quick off of newegg.com (I deal with them all the time and they are VERY reliable.)

Foxconn CasEdge Case with 400W Power Supply - $88
AMD Athlon XP 2800+ "Barton", 333MHz FSB, 512K Cache Processor - Retail - $121
ASUS "A7N8X" nForce2 Ultra 400 Chipset - $83
2x Crucial 184 Pin 512MB DDR PC-2700 - OEM - $186.00 (You WILL need atleast 1GB for video editing...trust me, I know.)
AOpen nVIDIA GeForce FX5700LE Video Card, 128MB DDR - $87
Maxtor 120GB 7200RPM IDE Hard Drive, Model 6Y120P0, OEM Drive Only - $86.49
NEC 8X Black Dual Layer DVD+/-RW Drive, Model ND-2510A BLK, OEM BULK - $74.99 (DAAAAAMN good deal on that sucker!)
Leadtek PCI TV/FM Tuner Card, REMOTE, Model "WinFast TV2000 XP Deluxe" -RETAIL - $43.89
Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack SP1a - OEM - $141 (Its $84 for the student/teacher version...which is the same thing, only cheaper.)

Grand total: $ 911.37

Just FYI, you will not need anything more than a 400W power supply with a rig like this. There is no way in hell it will even come close to eating up 400W of power unless you slapped in a dual processor rig with a shitload of fans and lights. I have a very similar system running on a Foxconn 350W power supply with no problems whatsoever.

Now you can obviously trim it a little by going for a cheaper case, but I'd stick to the Foxconn line if I were you. They tend to have lower priced power stuff that give you the best bang for your buck.

Note: I've never been asked for my student ID number when buying academic software (yes, I am an actual college student) so try for the student edition if you can.

I've heard SDRAM is actually more costly than DDR nowadays, and I have large quantities of it laying around... is this true? (probably won't sell any of it, since I will always have a use for old computers).

Pu-239 wrote:I've heard SDRAM is actually more costly than DDR nowadays, and I have large quantities of it laying around... is this true? (probably won't sell any of it, since I will always have a use for old computers).

Thats quite true. It costs just a little more than the equivilent ammount of DDR. I'm just glad I've got 640MB of PC133 stuck into an old system. (using that system for testing purposes)

Thanks for the specs, Vertigo1

Lord Poe wrote:Thanks for the specs, Vertigo1

Yeah, even if you don't go for what I posted above, don't accept less than 1GB of RAM. I've got half a gig in my system right now and it takes me 20 - 25 minutes to render a 23 minute SVCD formate mpeg from an mpeg2 stream. (For the record, I have an Athlon XP 2800+ chip, and both sticks of RAM are in dual channel mode.)

btw, I intentionally left out a monitor, keyboard, and mouse because you can get those locally alot cheaper than online.