Building a system for G400 editing.

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Dangerously
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Joined: Aug 22 2001

I posted this question in the Computer Video setups board and the DV editing board (after having no luck in the first board) and had no replies at all. So, i'm trying my luck in this forum too. I know I shouldn't do this, but it's worth a blast.

Basically, i've been doing everything on my Win 98 SE PC, editing M-Jpeg footage, composing music, using the internet, playing games, installing pointless software (eg Textbridge) etc. This has brought up certain problems regarding capturing and editing. I have just recently invested in a Promise Fasttrak 100 TX2 Raid controller and two Maxtor hard disks, and this has upset the playback of my M-Jpeg files on ALL drives. I posted a question about this problem on the Hard Disk Forum but everyone seems as stumped as I am.
So I want to build a new system, just for editing video footage. I will be putting the following cards into it,

Matrox Marvel G400
Soundblaster Live Player 5.1
Promise Fasttrak 100 TX2 Controller with the two striped hard disks.

I will also stick my DVD drive on there (just for a cd-rom) and, if I can, my extra 256 meg Ram that I added to this PC some time ago. This is purely to save money and I may go for more RAM at a later date. Someone told me you can now get RAM that speeds up the PC as well! Blimey.

Can anyone recommend a nice motherboard, processor and Ram for this. I'm only going to do this once, for a few years anyway, so i'll be after something pretty nice and quick. I'll also be putting in a system disk and something my mate has recommended that will allow me to transfer files over from my old PC (just images and soundfiles etc, not programs.). I'll also be installing Premiere 6 and probably Photoshop, Bryce 4 (because the new PC will be able to render faster) and TMPGEnc as well as all the drivers and that, obviously. I will also consider installing Win 2K on the new system also, but I believe the G400 may have trouble on there. This may also cause problems if I want to transfer files from my Win98 PC to the new Win 2K PC.

Any advice at all would be very much appreciated. Cheers.

Bomag
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Joined: Aug 15 2000

Can you find out which motherboard and chipset you are using?

There is a known compatibility problem with VIA chipsets and the SB Live cards. This results in problems in disk access using DMA, jerky video being one problem. Some people (inc myself) also found that it effected the stability of thier RAID array.

This problem was mostly solved through BIOS and driver updates. It sounds like your system is one of those effected and it sould be solved by a couple of doumloads!