I'm considering building a dedicated video caputure box for recording signals from cable and satilitte feeds. Among the hardware I'm considering is a 2.5 Ghz Celeron processor, ATI All In Wonder 9600 card with 128 MB Video memory onboard, and 512 MB of pc3200 DDR and a 400 Mhz FSB motherboard by aopen.
Are you specifically tied to anIntel platform? AMD offers considerably more bang-for-the-buck than either the badly-crippled (cache-starved) Celeron or the P4. You can use the money you save to purchase better audio/video capture hardware or fancier software.
TallCool1
Practically a Posting Shark
865 posts since May 2003
Reputation Points: 149
Solved Threads: 45
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, the800 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.
TallCool1
Practically a Posting Shark
865 posts since May 2003
Reputation Points: 149
Solved Threads: 45
quote:
Nobody should ever buy a Celeron, for any reason, no matter what.
That is a bit extreme. I have used celerons for some time and I have not had any problems with them. Remeber, most people use their computers to write reports, e-mail, and surf the net. Celerons will do that with no problems.
The Soundman, I don't think you will have any problems with either intel or amd. It will probably come down to pricing for you.
twilli227
Junior Poster in Training
59 posts since Dec 2003
Reputation Points: 56
Solved Threads: 1
quote:
Nobody should ever buy a Celeron, for any reason, no matter what.
That is a bit extreme. I have used celerons for some time and I have not had any problems with them. Remember, most people use their computers to write reports, e-mail, and surf the net. Celerons will do that with no problems.
Butstreaming video is what we are discussing here, and that's absolutely the worst possible use for the Celeron.
The Celeron processor was developed for one reason only: marketing-by-numbers (clock speed). There is no customer benefit to it whatsoever. Its in-built limitations make it a poor choice for any purpose. You can research the benchmarks yourself -- a slower P4 will outperform a faster Celeron by a wide margin. You can cherry-pick benchmarks to show some advantage, but in balanced real-world use, there's no comparison. Why spend more for less performance?
TallCool1
Practically a Posting Shark
865 posts since May 2003
Reputation Points: 149
Solved Threads: 45