Building a new computer system, comments wanted

[Edan]

Thanks for the comments, everyone!

Some more questions:

If my system only needs a 350W Power supply, and I get a 400W (or 500W, etc) PS, does it use/waste significantly more energy then if I went with a 350W PS, or does it use more energy as the system needs it?

High cache on a hard drive won't help for capturing video, but might if I'm editing video, right?

Are the screwless systems (eg, this) for drives and/or pci cards) worth getting?

I'm not planning on overclocking - will the heatsink/thermal paste that comes with the CPU be sufficent?

[alva]

It's in dutch but I'll give you the short version:

AMD stil kicks Intel's butt.

http://www.tweakers.net/nieuws/36056

Athlon 64 3800+ 7716
Pentium 4 EE 720 6667
Athlon 64 3200+ 6402
Pentium 4 630 5333
Pentium 4 530 (32-bits) 4413

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Q Cubed

Not completely attached to intel, but for high end stuff I'm more interested in video capture/editing than gaming (I'll do some gaming, but a majority of the games I play are adventure or strategy, and when it comes to FPS, I'm not a 53 thousand frames for second kind of person - as long as I can play it, I'm happy.)

Ah, that's trickier. Intel traditionally performs better when it comes to multimedia applications.

I don't know what the benchmarks are these days, but it's my understanding that Intel still edges out AMD.

It depends on the multimedia application nowadays. For video encoding, Intel seems to have an edge, but since Edan does video capture (not really a CPU issue) and video editing, I'd still say go for AMD 64.

[DanS]

I can imagine that the video folks will quickly take advantage of both multi-core and 64-bit processing once Intel releases it into the wild.

Video decoding and deinterlacing in HD is one of my main applications, and a single P4 core can just handle the decoding all in software. In order for it to be able to handle the deinterlacing as well, I'm going to wait for the multi-cores.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by DanS
Video decoding and deinterlacing in HD is one of my main applications, so I'm going to wait for the multi-cores.

Decoding is much easier than encoding. You don't need to wait.

[DanS]

I edited you. You can't decode and deinterlace at the same time very well on 1080i material, such as sports.

[Edan]

video capture (not really a CPU issue)

Depends on how it's being captured - with hardware-only capture methods, yeah. But the ATI AIW utilizes the CPU to improve the quality of the mpeg2 captures..

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Edan
Depends on how it's being captured - with hardware-only capture methods, yeah. But the ATI AIW utilizes the CPU to improve the quality of the mpeg2 captures..

Still it probably won't eat up too much CPU time no? It's not like the task is offloaded to the CPU.

[Edan]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Still it probably won't eat up too much CPU time no? It's not like the task is offloaded to the CPU.

You'd be suprised. I currently have an Athelon 900, and can generally capture between 2-4mbps with none to minimal frames dropped. But if I go higher than that mbps, increase the number of P or B frames, or raise the motion estimatation quality, the frames start dropping significantly.

[Urban Ranger]

Looking around Anandtech a bit yields this comparison graph:

[Edan]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Looking around Anandtech a bit yields this comparison graph:

Thanks. It looks like Intel still holds the edge, at least at the budget I'm looking at (The FX53, the Pentium 4 EE and the 3800+ are fairly expensive),

[Asher]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
It depends on the multimedia application nowadays. For video encoding, Intel seems to have an edge, but since Edan does video capture (not really a CPU issue) and video editing, I'd still say go for AMD 64.

You almost never keep the video capture in MPEG2 format, you will encode it.

If he's doing multimedia stuff like that, Pentium 4 makes more sense. The Netburst architecture was designed for that kind of stuff, there's no disadvantage to the long pipeline of the Pentium 4, meaning it's clock-for-clock similar to the K8 with a higher clock rate.

The K8 does way better in floating-point intensive apps with any kind of branching in it.

[Atahualpa]

What's so special about the AIW cards?
The X600 isn't really a good card anymore. I think it's just the PCI-X version of the 9600, which is becoming outdated rather quickly.

The rest is okay, though I prefer AMD over Intel, but in your case Intel is probably better.
Though I'd still buy AMD, because it sucks less power.

[Edan]

Originally posted by Atahualpa
What's so special about the AIW cards?

Well, the quality of the software in terms of the TV/capture is pretty good (it used to be mediocre but ATI has improved it alot in the last 6-7 years.). In terms of capture quality it tends to be good (the only comparable capture card being the Hauppauge PVRs, which have hardware encoding, but from what I understand, it doesn't allow much in the way of options when capturing video except a few preset sizes, compared with the AIW. Also, the software on the Hauppauge is supposed to be poor (although there are third party software available).

The X600 isn't really a good card anymore. I think it's just the PCI-X version of the 9600, which is becoming outdated rather quickly.

Do you mean it's not a good card in terms of game playing or in terms of capture? For gameplay, while better grphics is certainly better, I'm more concerned with the ability to play games for a long period of time - although maybe it is worth looking at better cards. I suppose I should consider upgrading the card when the X800 drops in price (how long will that likely be?).

I suppose I should consider a seperate TV card (either an ATI capture card or possibly the hauppauge - I've heard good things from reviewers about the TV Wonder Elite, but that isn't out yet, AFAIK), to make an upgrade easier. So m,aybe I should consider getting a cheap PCI-16 card for the moment, like an OEM/barebone version of the plain x300 or x600 (do they come with any cables or anything other than the card and cd?)

Or should I concider nVidea? (I've never had one).

[Atahualpa]

Not good in terms of playing games. Don't know about capturing, I never had one.

Here is a bench with an older game:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041222/vga_charts-05.html

Here a newer:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041222/vga_charts-06.html

Okay they are all shooters, but you should get the point.

I mean, I shouldn't really be talking here, because I played through Doom3 and Half-Life 2 on a GF4TI4200 and that card sucks big time compared to a X600.