Re: dumb question about nvidia nforce and geforce cards and AMD boxes....

[Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 08:12:45PM +0000, Michael Fothergill wrote:
> 
> I have been reading a little on the web about graphics cards.
> 
> The machine I currently use is an AMD 64 Sempron 3200 machine (AM2 board) 
> with what is termed on board graphics.
> 
> I also have an 80GB ATA drive in it and a DVD optical drive.  THe machine 
> has 512 MB of RAM at present.
> 
> I am thinking of upgrading it a bit.  I thought to add a further 1GB of RAM 
> and get myself a graphics card so I could do video editing and mess about 
> with e.g. Blender.
> 

Hi Michael,

I see you've received an excellent discussion on grahpics cards.  Allow
me to present my additional 2 c.

For video editing and playback, as far as the graphics card is
concerned, you have a video data stream that needs converting to data to
send to the monitor.  That's called mpeg decoding.  It can be done by
software or hardware.  I thought that I would have to spend and arm and
a leg to get it done in hardware.  Instead, I paid $60 and got an Asus
card based on an nVidia EN7300GT that does almost everything in
hardware.  However, only the closed-source nVidia driver will use the
hardware while the free nv driver will use software.  Hardware gets you
a better image and uses less CPU oompf.

So get yourself a good graphics card and install the software you want,
open up an xterm and run top.  Watch what happens as you watch a video
or try to edit one.  If your memory gets used up and you start to swap,
add more memory.  If the memory is OK but the processor is very busy,
put in a better CPU.  If you can only afford one or the other (the cost
for an Athlon AM2 CPU and 1 GB DDR2-800 ECC memory is about the same),
you need top to tell you which.

Third, watch for the CPU waiting for IO.  You may want to take a look at
adding a second drive.  If the board will do SATA-II, so much the
better.

In short, get a decent video card then look for the bottlenecks and
remove them until the performance is where you want it.

Doug.