New video card?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ian D. Weatherall
  • Start date Start date
I

Ian D. Weatherall

Hi Folks,
I am looking at building a new system, I think I have decided on an Athlon64
3200, 1Gb Ram & the Asus A8V mobo, this pretty much maxes out my budget of
$800 CAD, I will be using a Radeon 7500 AIW I already own and HDD I have as
well.
Here is the question, is the Radeon up to the job or should I pull back on
the system so I can get a better card, I have a pal ar ATI so $150 would get
me a highend card?
Regards,
Ian
 
Hi Folks,
I am looking at building a new system, I think I have decided on an Athlon64
3200, 1Gb Ram & the Asus A8V mobo, this pretty much maxes out my budget of
$800 CAD, I will be using a Radeon 7500 AIW I already own and HDD I have as
well.
Here is the question, is the Radeon up to the job or should I pull back on
the system so I can get a better card, I have a pal ar ATI so $150 would get
me a highend card?
Regards,
Ian
Click to expand...


Up to the job of doing what?

It'll be no better or worse in the new build than the old.
It's already the bottleneck for gaming, never was a
bottleneck for 2D except zooming, editing very large images.

If gaming is important the video card should be the first
thing replaced, not the last.... assuming your resent CPU
is already >= 1GHz. However, if you're considering
replacement of both motherboard and video it might be good
to consider that purchase simultaneously and get nForce4
w/PCI express.
 
Hello,
Thank you for the reply,
I do play games but they are not a big factor in my decision, 1 of my needs
is to encode vhs to dvd. So I was thinking the faster system wouold be the
better option.
Regards,
Ian
 
Hello,
Thank you for the reply,
I do play games but they are not a big factor in my decision, 1 of my needs
is to encode vhs to dvd. So I was thinking the faster system wouold be the
better option.
Regards,
Ian
Click to expand...

A "better" video card will not speed up encoding. Well, I
might be wrong due to more recent developments, supposedly
some of the new nVidia 6600 & similar cards do have hardware
mpeg encoding support but I don't know how that would be
taken advantage of to increase performance, but it is
possible that could help. Perhaps someone else can
elaborate on that feature.

Otherwise, upgrading to faster than a 7500 (for example a
Geforce FX5900 or Radeon 9800 Pro) would gain you nothing
for encoding MPEG2 (DVDs), but do a lot to speed up gaming.
 
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