High End DIY - opinions please...

Hi,

I am about to review my PC motherborad and CPU with a new upgrade. I have good system components-

P733 on Asus CUV-4X
768Mb (3xPC133)
IBM UATA 45GB + 2 x Maxtor UATA/100 EIDE striped Raid
Yamaha 16/10/40 CD-RW
Hercules GTS Ultra 64Mb
Hitachi DVD-ROM
Win2000 SP1

but still hit processor as a frequent bottleneck. I do a fair bit of amateur DV editing and image processing and would like to be able to MPEG4 my movies onto CD etc. Also music ripping etc.

Right now I'm trying to work out the best direction for better processing capacity. I am on a pretty free budget (some may say I should just buy a G4 for DV) but not unlimited (an extra $1k - $1.5k).

I still need to retain an ISA slot for a PCMCIA reader I need, plus I have an IDE raid card (I could retire with a raid motherboard) and Firewire interfaces etc.



Assuming free hand - should I look at 2 CPU intel v.s. single large AMD? Is there an AMD ATX board out there with the 5PCI, AGP4 and single ISA that I need?

I lean towards AMD 1200 but will the board I need be available and is it going to be faster for image and adio processing that a pair of PIII 1000s?

Thanks for your opinions,

Pete.

well I use an AMD 1.2GHz Tbird for video editing and rendering and it runs very well. I am not sure if it will be faster than dual PIII 1000s, but I do not think that the PIIIs would be that much faster, but they would be a lot more expensive. I would go with the AMD.
the KT7A has 6 PCI, 1 ISA, 1 AGP 4x. It is what I use. It is very good. the KT7A-Raid has RAID support.
The Asus A7M266 has DDR RAM support, 5 PCI, 1 CNR, 1 AGP4x. Not sure if it has an ISA or Raid support. So if you don't need DDR the KT7A-Raid, for about 170, is an excellent choice.
Both boards support 133MHz FSB (the bus speed. Rather than 100 MHz you can go higher. the AMD is double pumped so its actually 266MHz bus. very fast).
So my opinion is go with AMD. Like I said, I just switched over from a PIII450 to it, and I am very happy with speed, stability, etc... in games, video editing, etc...

PS I am so NOT a mac fan, can't stand them, but I do a lot of DV also and I do know the G4 is fast and I heard it has a great editing program, Final Cut Pro is what I think it is called. Its a little spendy but I hear its one of the best.
I use Ulead MediaStudio Pro 6.0 for PC and I love it though. It is cheaper and much better than Premiere in my opinion, plus it has a lot of bonuses.
Like I said though, I like PCs. since you already have so much hardware for the PC I say stick with that, plus PC has a lot fo great software like AfterEffects and stuff thats not available for mac.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by dannyaa on 02/14/01 12:42 PM.</EM></FONT></P>