I was thinking Celeron as You can go 800 FSB as opposed to 333 max with the AMD line so I can make to most of the 400Mhz DDR and keep everything in sync. I may check my price list for an AMD solution yet. I have an 850 Duron system now, but I don't think I can do full MPEG 2 capture with it.
As I pointed out in another thread, the
800 MHz and
533 MHz front-side bus speeds that
Intel advertises are more than a bit misleading. These are
quad-pumped busses -- two interleaved DDRAM channels. With the
AMD family, the
nForce chipsets do this.
Don't be fooled -- even a 800-MHz-bus Celeron is no match for ANY AMD processor. That's like saying a go-kart motor can spin 10,000 RPM -- so what? The Celeron's limited cache, when combined with the long pipeline of the P4 architecture, is deadly to performance. Nobody should ever buy a Celeron, for any reason, no matter what.
The differences between the
Mac and
PC platforms when used with graphics and video applications is narrowing fast, especially with the new
AMD-64 systems and the
Linux 2.6 kernel.