Very nice. Im really liking that site. I was wondering about video cards tho. They usually include the Geforce4 MX440 64MB. How much better is, lets say the ATI Radeon 9000 PRO 128MB? Is it worth the 54 bucks they cost you to upgrade to that? What would you guys recommend there?

with the MX. the radeon of course. MX is a low scale Geforce brand.

now if it was a Geforce4 Ti something 128 then id say the geforce.

im very fond of the nvidia drivers over ati's

I think I'm going to order my comp tonight from this site. I found the best prices/deal for me if you go to the section "gamer best buy" and then modify to your needs. I subtracted the monitor, but upgraded to the Radeon 9500, I'll post when I receive my goods to let you know how it went.

What about sound? Think I should upgrade to the Sound Blaster live stuff, or would the ''on board 3D stereo sound'' suit me just fine? I mean, Im not going to be using the surround anyways, so I figure the on board stuff should work fine...right?

EDIT: Also, why the hell do I save 40 bucks by choosing the Geforce 4 Ti 4800 SE 128MB over the Ti 4600 128MB? Isnt the 4800 better? What does the SE mean?

depends on what ya do with it. how much you want sound. how high of quality you expect.

i personally have a Sound Blaster Audigy.
so i can do surround sound.

not exactly sure what all a live does. prolly just stereo. like your onboard one. unless your a music buff or play a lot of games. your not going to notice the diff between an onboard and the SB live.

OK, here's what $1254 buys you at that site we discussed earlier in the thread:

Board: MSI648MAX-L SIS-648 Chipset AGP/10/100 main

Silver case with upgrade to 420 watt power supply

Intel Pentium 4 2.4 ghz (533FSB,Northwood, 512k)

couple extra cpu fans, etc

512MB DDR-400 PC3200 mhz

Western Digital 80 gig hd

Radeon 9500-pro

16x dvd rom

48x16x48 cd-rw

soundblaster audigy 5.1

surround sound speakers

windows xp and norton av,

of course all the odds and ends that don't deserve mentioning.... like floppy, keyboard, etc

not bad, right... oh and no monitor! a friend is
hooking me up with a decent 17", i should get it all next week

Nice...I was going for a 2.5 ghz Geforce 4 Ti4800 SE with 512 Mb RAM and a 80 gig Hard Drive...but I didnt have the good speakers or the good sound card because I know I wont be setting up surround in my computer room so I knew I wouldnt be needing it. But my dad says he isnt buying anything til he gets our entertainmant unit for the living room fully paid for. Should be in April.

Workstation:

Athlon 2400 cooled by an Alpha PAL 8045
Abit KD7-RAID
512 MB DDR SDRAM/PC 2700
Adaptec 29160 SCSI card
Seagate Cheetah 18.4 GB 10,000 rpm HD
2 x 80 GB Seagate Barracuda IV's in software RAID 1
40 GB Barracuda in removable caddy
Geforce 4 Ti4200 128 MB
Audigy Platinum
Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM
Philips 48/24/24 CDRW
Dual booting Win2k and Redhat
All wrapped up in a Lian Li PC-65


File server:

1 GHz P3
384 MB SDRAM
30 GB Fujitsu hard drive
3ware 4 channel IDE RAID card
2 x 120 GB Western Digital Caviars (RAID 1)
Running Redhat


HTPC (half built):

Athlon 1800
256 MB DDR SDRAM
Gigabyte 7VKML mATX motherboard
Audigy
ATI AIW 9000
20 GB Seagate Barracuda
Will eventualy run Mandrake and Win2k once it's finished


I also use two other C's in the house as render nodes for making my XviD's of DVD's (my workstation does most of the work), cuts a render down to about three hours.

All of these were built by my fair hand. If I'd have bought them ready made, they'd have cost me about a third more again.

SB Live will do 5.1 surround, but it's partly done in software, so has more CPU overhead than the Audigy. But if you don't have decent speakers forget buying a soundcard and just use the onboard codec (assuming your mobo has one), you'll never be able to tell the difference.

As far as graphics goes, if you're serously into games, I'd go for one of the cheaper GF4 Ti chipsets (64 MB of VRAM will do you fine, byt the time games actually need 128 MB of VRAM the GF4 will be crap anyway), but then nVidia's drivers have always been streets ahead of ATI's. Yeah, the 9700 is the best at the moment blah blah blah, but it's never a good idea to buy the top of the line, as the price drops quickly soon after. For the price conscious gamer, the GF4's up to the Ti4200 and the Radeon 9000 series are a good bet, and will run Doom3 and Unreal 2 at respectable framerates.

P.S.

If you can be bothered to learn how to build your own computer, do so. You will never want to buy an off-the-shelf PC ever again.

hmm........ www.ebay.com or perhaps www.pricewatch.com or even check www.dealtime.com. i would really recommend www.ibuypower.com also some great deals

hmm... well these palces do Parts AND full PC's, but try:

www.Directron.com (They're affliated with Yahoo and I've bnought parts from them, very nice, this is going ot be my Dual-Boot Comp) and:

www.HardDrive.com as the name suggest this is a palce with Powerful PC's and loads of HDDs to put in them, I KNOW Directron builds PCs and I'm pretty sure Hard Drive does as well.

See what you can find there.

Oh and Pika, DAMN MAN! You render Videos in about 3 Hours!?! How large are these,a r ethey full-fledged movies or half hour to an hour long TV shows!?!

I try rendering an AVI (M-JPEG from capture) that's roughly 21 Minutes and by the time I fix the darn thing (Deinterlace the VHS Video, remove Watermarks, resize it, and sharpen/soften it) it can take me an entire day!

Please man, share the wealth and tell me how you're rendering so dman quickly! I dont' keep these AVIs on my PC (3GB is way too much to keep around), but I DO burn them to DVD-R using my DMR-HS2, I just want to speed up the time I spend starting at VirtualDub, which can be quite tedious, trust me.

so i've had my new comp for a couple of weeks, and i love it! i have no complaints at all with ibuypower.com they did a great job in getting me all set up with what i wanted for an affordable price. i almost forgot how much better FPS's on the pc are. online gaming is also just so smoooth.. :D

Yah, I'm doing full length movies ripped from DVD, but this isn't the full time it takes from beginning to end, just for the render into XviD. I'm currently putting together a guide for ripping DVD's in Windows but briefly (for an average 110 min movie)...

Rip VOB's et al to HDD (10 minutes)
Extract the AC3 audio to PCM WAV using DVD2AVI (40 minutes)
Compress the audio to a RIFF-WAV MP3 or ogg with CDEX for loading into virtual dub (20 minutes)
Export the d2v project created with DVD2AVI into a .avi to act as a frameserver for Virtual Dub using the VFAPI reader codec (seconds)
2 pass DivX/XviD render in Virtual Dub resized 576*324 (3 hours)

This'll give me a nice chunky 1.2 GB divx which I can split onto two CD's.

Luckily I have PAL DVD's so I never have to de-interlace, and I've never tried converting a directly captured AVI yet (since I don't have a capture card).

What tricks are there to it? Not alot really.
1. Shut down all non-essential services and apps
2. Hack your registry so that windoze uses all the RAM you have instead of swapping when you have 400 MB free
3. Run it all off a SCSI disk - stupidly fast random access and sustained transfers (plus none of that mucking about with software RAID)
4. You can save yourself a bit of time and space by setting your max keyframe interval really large, this way the codec'll only put a keyframe in where you need it.

If you want to use renderfarm support, you can try Vidomi - it's mainly based on Virtual Dub. I used it at first due to the renderfarm support, but have since used Virtual Dub more and more since I think it's better.

WARNING: If you are not a tech head, do not listen to the tech heads.:D

Seriously, while building your own PC may be the cheapest and best way to go, if you are not familiar with how to do this I would NOT BUILD YOUR OWN. Too much can and will go wrong. You could fry your motherboard, break components, or just plum forget something important and then wonder why your PPC has trouble running Excel. But if you are a tech head, go right ahead.

I recommend Dell. They have great customer service, high quality and warrantees. The prices are a little more than say HP or Compaq, but you definitely get what you pay for. The case looks great and you crack it open like your would open a book for easy upgrading. Plus, unlike other PC makers, Dell is non-proprietary and the warrantee is STILL GOOD if you crack the case and ticker with the insides (as long as you ddon't fry anything:D). I saved money and upfgraded to 512 of RDRAM myself, and my warrantee is still intact. I'll be upgrading to 9600 Pro shortly :D

Gateway used to be good, but now the more techies I talk to the less respect I have for them. I actually talked to people in my IT department and they recommended getting a Compaq before a Gateway.

Alienware used to be good as well, but evidently they were bought put by some company and their customer service and quality have gone down considerably since then.

best place is oddcomps.com they will do anything you want acctaully i can probally get you a discount just email sysop@oddcomps.com and say oddball374 told you about it

Are there any good sites for Canadian buyers.

I know about the obvious www.dell.ca/home/ but that can be more expensive for what I want.

thanks.