Help with video rendering spec

OnTheEdge · 3 Apr 2006 at 09:16

Hello

Following the storm the other night my desktop and router fried in the lightning

I’ve been digging around a little and the spec below looks good to me. The thing is I don’t play games, the machine will be used for video rendering, AfterEffects, DVD authoring etc. Is there a better spec (i.e. Intel or more RAM) that would be more beneficial to my requirements?

Antec Performance TX1088AMG Metallic Grey Tower Case - 480w Truepower PSU (CA-035-AN) £89.95

HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £259.95

Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition inc. SP2 - OEM - 1Pk £79.95

MY-079-CS Corsair 2GB DDR XMS3200C2PT TwinX (2x1GB) CAS2 £109.95

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ (Socket 939) - Retail £279.95

MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum nForce4 Ultra (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard £64.95

Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740GD 10,000RPM SATA 8MB Cache £93.50

I have a few big discs, dvd writer etc to slip in

Also does anyone have any experience with house insurance claims on computers due to lightning

Many thanks in advance

Mark

james.miller · 3 Apr 2006 at 09:18

do you want to gave heavily on that pc? if not drop the card. the graphics card has very little influence on rendering. tbh other than that, it'll be quite a beast anyway.

Mr Mister · 3 Apr 2006 at 09:21

i think with after affects it does use 3d graphics rendering power to some extent. not sure how much tho.

OnTheEdge · 3 Apr 2006 at 09:33

Thanks for the replies. AfterEffects does have some 3D options, including things like particle physics, which are a bitch to preview at times, but I don't tend to use them that often.

Do you think the Matrox cards, which I've used in the past would be better? I have used a Matrox RT.X100 Xtreme Pro, but the advantages only really show when compositing several uncompressed video streams at once

cheers

OnTheEdge · 3 Apr 2006 at 12:29

After a little more digging it seems the NVIDIA cards are the way forward. AfterEffects 7 is programmed to take advantage of the GPU.

So what's the best value card without going OTT

something like the OcUK GeForce 7900 GT 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-037-OK) £199.95?

Uh and my monitor only has VGA, will a DVI to VGA cable work OK or does it need a digital to analogue conversion