Need a new home for Mystique 170 with Rainbow Runner Studio

[Daggy]

Can anyone help me?

I have a Mystique 170 with RRS currently on a p166. For obvious reasons I am looking to upgrade the mobo & processor, however a previous attempt to move the card onto a slightly faster board processor combo was a disaster and I was forced to put the 166 system back together just to maintain a working setup.

Does anyone have experience with this card on recent mobos, or maybe point out traps I should be aware of. I have been considering an Athlon/Duron solution but dont want to move blind. I will most likely stick with Win98 as the OS on this system.

Eventually I may upgrade this card, but it does the job for me at the moment, I just want to be able to edit and render faster than I can currently.

Thanks

Daggy

[This_Idiot]

G'day Daggy

When you talk about upgrading a P166, you're really talking about a whole new machine. Minus, perhaps, the monitor or soundcard. For a start you'll need a new case, as you won't fit (or connect) a modern mainboard into an old style AT case. Then the RAM on your 166 won't support modern chipsets, the HD's you already have are unlikely to be ATA (UDMA) compatible, and to get the best out of a modern board you'll want to use an AGP graphics card.

Given all this, you could try building a new machine (or, perish the thought, buy one). To save a bit of money, you could buy a switchbox so that you can use the same keyboard, mouse and monitor with both machines, but with the price of monitors dropping like a stone, you'd be almost as well-off buying a 17".

Then stick in a 100Mbit network card into each machine, use your old one for capture and install a software MJPEG codec on the modern machine so that you can do the editing and rendering on the new machine.

I do a fair bit of "recycling", as my family members all demand their own machines, so every time I upgrade one of my own machines, all the others get hand-me-downs. The biggest problem has been the difference between old AT and new ATX boards, so I keep making regular trips to our local PC store to buy new cases. In fact I've just got rid of the last AT case.

Hope this all makes sense to you

Cheers
Chris
(T_I)

[Daggy]

Chris

Thanks for the feedback, You are absolutely right. I have an old ATX case with a 300W PS which has an old Gigabyte board in it. I tried swapping all my peripherals onto this board,(Primarily because it had more RAM than my AT) then spent a week trying to get better performance than my AT out of it. I couldnt even get worse performance (I shudder to think how many OS, driver reloads and BIOS/OS tweaks I tried in that time). Anyway, I gave up in disgust and swapped it all back.

So my plan is to use the existing case and SDRAM (128MB PC133) on the new board (this would obviously exclude boards which require DDR RAM, but not those which can utilise both). I use a 1.5GB WD 31600 drive for my OS and programs and a 10GB IBM Deskstar16GP for captures (this is a UDMA33 drive). To date these drives have been fast enough, so i'll stick with them as well

I already have a 17" monitor, which I originally purchased with the system (cost a fortune back then). It's a Philips Brilliance 17A and it is still a great monitor.

I like youre idea regarding the two system set-up and believe me, I would go that way in a flash if the budget allowed. But I must keep costs in check or I'll be looking for new accomodation (or at least sharing with the dogs for a while). With this in mind I figure that if I can get a new PC up and running with my existing Graphics Card for now and then upgrade it to AGP down the track (Possibly something like a G450eTV) of course I would need to upgrade the HDD at the same time, but this could be good opportunity to look at a RAID setup. (So many configurations, so little money!!!!)

The only other component I will need to upgrade is the soundcard, and I was thinking about a SB Live 5.1DE for this, but I'm not sure whether some of the issues with SB cards and Video capture have been resolved.

Any thoughts on this strategy?

DJ

[Daggy]

Chris

Just to udate you on where I am at the moment with the upgrade of the PC.

I basically built a new machine. EPOX 8KTA3+Pro Motherboard, 256MB RAM (SD), Athlon 1600XP all in a shiny new case with a 300W PS.

Took a little while to get my modem and NIC working but they're OK now. Haven't tried capture or edit yet, but I did playback some old clips (MJPEG) and they seemed to stutter a bit. I'll be tweaking the system this weekend to try and fix this and hopefully try some captures/edits.

Will let you know how things turn out.

Darren