RT.X10 and my PC

[Enak]

Having seen the new RT.X10 is out very soon I now will have the perfect combo to replace my G400MAX and Rainbow Runner G.

But, I run a dual 850MHz PC with 512Mb RAM. The minimum specifications for the RT.X10 specify a 1GHz CPU. Will it still run on my PC? I am only really interested in video capture at the moment to archive all my tapes in MPEG2 and maybe export to VCD/ SVCD/ DIVX.

[Dr Mordrid]

One thing about the Matrox RT card recommended system sheets: FOLLOW THEM

That said you can set yourself up for the RT.X100 fairly cheaply given that these cards just love the SiS 735/745 chipped mainboards, which are very reasonably priced.

What CPU/mainboard are you using now?

Dr. Mordrid

[Enak]

I'm using Dual Slot 1 850Mhz Pentium III CPU's in a supermicro P6DBE.

[Dr Mordrid]

RT.X10 does not support dualies. A better system would be a cheap ECS K7S6A (or some other SiS 735/745/746 based mainboard) with an AthlonXP 2000+ or faster and 512 mb of DDR266. For P4's a SiS 645/648 chipped board should work as well. The SiS 645 has been tested with the RT.X's, but media reports on the SiS 648 have also been promising.

The SiS Athlon & P4 chipsets have gobs of bandwidth plus they're VERY stable. AthlonXP's are bigtime fast for media content creation.

Dr. Mordrid

[Enak]

I was hoping I could use it with my Parhelia next month... I can't afford to upgrade my system any further than that!

[Dr Mordrid]

My RT.X100 works great with the Parhelia so the RT.X10 should as well. Triplehead editing is cool

Paradigms have changed though and PIII dualies very often are hammered by fast AthlonXP systems. I know mine are blistering fast.

Time to start saving pennies....

Dr. Mordrid

[Enak]

But all I want to do is capture the video for now... Will it manage that?

Or should I look to upgrade?

[Dr Mordrid]

RT.X10 does not do realtime MPEG capture but requires rendering to HDD. RT.X100 does do MPEG-2 capture.

For economical DV to full frame MPEG-2 capture with decent quality you need at least 1 ghz even when the solution is software only (ex: VideoStudio6). <1 ghz will limit you to 352x240 or 352x480.

Dr. Mordrid

[Enak]

So would the X100 work?

[Dr Mordrid]

Yes, it can capture MPEG-2 in DVD resolution, but it would require the same hardware configuration as the RT.X10 and cannot edit MPEG in realtime. It and the RT.X10 work best when you edit in DV then export in MPEG. This allows you to do clean cuts, add titles and such.

The RT.X100's big advantage would be hardware accelerated MPEG export through its MediaExport batch encoder. Here you can set up several MPEG, Real and Windows Media profiles and export them in one sitting. This means you could encode DVD, VCD, SVCD Real and WM versions of a project in one gulp.

This would offer few advantages over your RRS using YUY2 enabled drivers and VideoStudio6. The only one I can think of would be that it would support a full DVD resolution of 720 wide while the RRS/Marvel/eTV do 704 wide. This mode would still require a CPU of >1 ghz....preferrably even more.

Dr. Mordrid

[Enak]

8(

Upgrade coming soon for me then!

[Dr Mordrid]

Seems like it. Since the AthlonXP's came along powerful systems on the cheap are now commonplace and even PIII dualie systems have fallen victim to them.

Dr. Mordrid

[Enak]

Well it's been coming for a while...

It's just costly, I don't believe in buying cheep stuff 8)

1. Rob bank...
2. Upgrade PC
3. Capture video