Hardware for Video Editing and AGP/PCI?

[07mackenzie]

I was just wondering what would be some good, but cheap hardware for video editing? I have about a 100$ gift spending card for amazon and I'm thinking I should get 512MB RAM (I currently already have 512mb installed) and a 128MB graphics card (our current one is only 64MB). My problem is that I have no idea what AGP/PCI are.

If my current graphics card seems to be a PCI, can I put AGP cards in my computer without needing a new motherboard? I find it hard to believe that there's no way to install an AGP video card on this computer seeing as it's only about 1 year old. It is a compaq with a p4 processor (2.4 GHZ), 512MB Ram, and a 160GB hard drive.

Here are my current finds; if you could let me know if one is better than the other, that would be great:

RAM-
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...d_csp_3/002-5357347-2714461?v=glance&n=507846

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...57347-2714461?v=glance&s=electronics&n=507846

Video card-
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...57347-2714461?v=glance&s=electronics&n=507846

(that's where my question about AGP vs. PCI comes into play...)

my current video card is a "SiS 651 Rev 00 64MB"

Thanks for any help

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

Okay for general video editing a video card is not that important, most 64 meg cards are also better than the 128 meg 9200 sh!tty edition (SE).

Now another 512 meg of ram will greatly help you. I would get that cheap PC3200 stuff in their instead of the more expensive and worse ram.

 

[horndude]

I dont think either will help much with video editing really.Video editing and encoding is all about brute force.It doesnt need much in the way of a video card,even a framebuffer device will work just fine,and as long as the app being used to do the editing doesnt need more RAM than you already have,adding more isnt going to help much if at all.What makes a fast editing machine is a processor(s) with a big L1 and L2 cache and fast clock speed to go with it.The P4 youve got would be average for a desktop PC these days when it comes to this, could be much worse,could be better.

As far as an AGP card, if it has an AGP slot then you can install one and disable the onboard video.

 

[07mackenzie]

Thanks everyone for the really fast responses! About the new processor, I really don't have the money or skill to upgrade that. I am, however, confused as to whether or not the general consensus would be that some more RAM would be a good/bad thing.

When editing, I have noticed a large amount of system halts/freezes/crashes, usually just leading to me losing some work and having to "end process" it...

 

[horndude]

Thanks everyone for the really fast responses! About the new processor, I really don't have the money or skill to upgrade that. I am, however, confused as to whether or not the general consensus would be that some more RAM would be a good/bad thing.

When editing, I have noticed a large amount of system halts/freezes/crashes, usually just leading to me losing some work and having to "end process" it...

depends on the app, some are pretty resource hungry for RAM, some arent,for example one of the ones I use just takes awhile to load a file cause it indexes each frame beforehand, the other one I use does this on the fly so its pretty fast,neither uses much RAM at all really, if your using windows you need a decent amount of RAM for just running windows, I would think 512mb would be enough though

if your experiencing crashes and freezes youve got either a software problem(more than likely) or maybe driver issues, there;s lots of incredibly buggy software out there being sold to end users