What are your ideas on these two Athlon 64 systems

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips (More info?)

In our last episode, I was considering trying to upgrade my existing
Celeron 500 system, but the prices of complete new systems are so
low that it seems that's the way to go. I was going to go with a
Celeron D system, but then these Athlon 64 systems showed up at
Circuit City:


eMachines model T6410 T6522

Price after rebates $429 $629
Processor - Athlon 64 3200+ 3500+
Socket 754 969
Ram 512m 1024m
Hard Drive - parallel ATA 160g 200g
ATI Theatre 550 pro TV
tuner w/remote no yes
Windows Home MC

Both:

DVD +/- R/RW drive
17" CRT monitor
Canon photo printer
1 PCI Express slot
3 PCI slots
128MB (shared) ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics


I don't do any gaming, but do a fair amount of video format
conversions and editing. I suspect I wouldn't notice the difference
in processor speed or hard drive size, and only wanted the TV tuner
so I could capture stuff off of VHS and analog 8mm tapes, but not
really to watch or record TV.

So it seemed to me that with the $200 price difference to work with,
I could buy another 512m of ram, and something like the ATI TV
Wonder Pro ($53) if I needed it, and still have money left over.

Or, if we eventually get some low-priced PCIe all-in-wonder type
cards, I could pick up both the tuner/capture function and a real
video card, all within one PCIe card. And maybe STILL have money
left over.

I'm a little concerned about the socket 754 vs 969, mainly because I
don't know what difference it makes.

In addition, the T6522 is a special version only for Circuit City,
which has the tuner card not included in the T6520 sold elswhere.
And there may be some problem with this setup. At the store I
duplicated a problem an earlier buyer had with the T6522: Open
MovieMaker, then click on Capture, and MM crashes with "Windows has
encountered a problem...". Of course there may be an easy fix for
this, but then again there may not be.

So, it seemed to me that the lower-price system, plus a stick of
ram, was really the better deal, unless the socket difference is
important in some way, or I'm underestimating the effect of the
speed difference of the processors.

Am I looking at this the right way? Whadayathink?