[GOOSEMON]

I have a Biostar motherboard with integrated graphics. However, I am thinking of purchasing a PCI Express Video Card to replace the onboard video. I will also add an additional gig of ram. Will a notice a difference with the video upgrade? Is it worth it?

Thanks for all the help folks...
Mahalo

[grandpabruce]

GOOSEMON, on Jan 2 2007, 05:23 PM, said:

I have a Biostar motherboard with integrated graphics. However, I am thinking of purchasing a PCI Express Video Card to replace the onboard video. I will also add an additional gig of ram. Will a notice a difference with the video upgrade? Is it worth it?

Thanks for all the help folks...
Mahalo

You will, but you better check to see if that motherboard has a PCI Express slot, before you purchase a PCI Express video card.

[gi7omy]

If you look inside the case you will see a row of card slots

If all slots are white and evenly spaced from the back of the case - they're PCI

If one is brown and set farther back - it's AGP

If it's black and set back, it's PCI-e

Make sure you get the right card as the incorrect one will NOT fit

[GOOSEMON]

Yeah, my motherboard has 2 PCI Express Slots and can accept up to 4 gigs of ram. It's a 939 socket Biostar T-model motherboard. I made sure that when I upgraded that I would not be limited. As for AGP, I thought they were extinct .

Thanks folks...

[gi7omy]

Extinct - not quite (just smell that way)

Actually - you can still get original PCI graphics cards even yet

[woodchuckr]

How much does a new video card help ? It just took me 2 hour 45 minutes to render a 1 hour
6 minute avi file. I was rendering it into 720x480 29.97FPS 6 Mbs. I have an asus a7n8x-e, 2.2 Ghz
athlon with 1 Gig of memory and 333 FSB. My video card is an AGP asus (ati) 9600SE ( I know it has the 64
bit bus vs a 128 bit bus). I don't think they make the 9600 series anymore and I'm not sure what would
be faster. It was using hardware rendering and the numbers it flashed up when it was doing the test was
140 FPS and 68 MPS memory access. Does one chip set (ati vs nvidia) work better than another
for rendering ? All the card specs/tests talk about games and nothing about dvd rendering. What
do you look for in a video card when you want it to do that ? Also, the asus website has 8.28 drivers for
this card and the ATI website has 7.1 drivers. Should you stay with your card manufacturer or go
with the chipset manufacturer to get the latest drivers. One final question is how the heck does
this all work ? Are there interfaces on the card where they pass it some data and the card formats it
to write to a file ? If anyone has a pointer to where I can read more about it, I'd gladly take it. Thanks

[gi7omy]

OK - drivers - use the nVidia or ATI or whatever (the chipset drivers)

Duration of rendering - it takes me roughly the length of the movie clip to render and I do have a fair bit of power here. Rendering is a VERY CPU intensive process and there's no getting round that (unless you have a budget like Pixar and can afford a farm of multi-CPU boxes with tons of RAM). It's just one of those things. Shut down any running processes, start rendering and go watch a movie on TV - that is normal

[woodchuckr]

qi7omy,
Thanks for the info. I do that. I have nothing running on the machine other than that. The machine
doesn't go on the internet, so it has no antivirus, firewall, etc. I've been toying with the idea of
upgrading, but they don't sell Socket A FSB 400 athlon's anymore. I know they have faster video
cards, but I don't know how much that would buy me. If it speeds it up 5 or 10 minutes, then it
isn't worth it. If speeds it up 30 minutes that might make it worth while. So the reason for my
video card question. I know new drivers can sometimes speed things up and up to now I've been
getting them from ASUS. I know nvidia prides themselves on their universal drivers, but I wasn't
sure if ATI did too. Things used to be "not my card, then you can't use my drivers". Guess things have
changed. Thanks again.

[gi7omy]

I've an AIT based card here and never had any problems getting drivers from the ATI site

Seriously it won't speed up rendering a lot - it's painfully slow and even guys with dual core top end CPUs find it's no real saving.

Just get a good video or DVD movie and go watch that while it renders

[woodchuckr]

qi7omy,
Thanks for the info. I think I'll pass on the new video card. The problem is what I want to
watch is what I'm burning :-) . Thanks again for all your help.