I am planning on building a new computer as I am still using my old Celeron 300A and BH6. One thing I would like to be able to do is edit video from my mini-DV camcorder and burn to video CD and DVD in future. Is it better to go with the Radeon 8500DV or with GeForce 2 or 3 and separate firewire capture card? How many fps do you need to get high quality video? According to ATI, the Radeon captures 30fps, while some separate cards will do 60fps.I admit I am a total newbie to digital editing so any suggestions are appreciated. Quality and stability are key. My current plan for the rest of the system follows:

ABIT KR7A-RAID (may consider similar ASUS or MSI for USB 2.0)
Athlon XP 1700+ or 1800+
512MB Corsair CAS 222
2 X Maxtor 40GB 7200 RPM ATA133 (in RAID 0)
Plextor CDRW (16 or 24X)
Soundblaster Live Value (from old PC)
Either Lian-Li PC-60USB or my old PCNut Case (mid tower ATX)
Either Sparkle/Enermax 350W or greater power supply.

Thanks in advance for you suggestions on video cards or planned system.

First I recommend not to get a Display card integrated with a capture card (like you don't buy a PCChips integrated main board)

you have a MiniDV camera and it's a big bonus. you can use a 25$ fire wire card to capture and export your material.

If you are in the NTSC world then for high quality capture you need 30FPS. (29.97). Any reason for 60FPS will be with Analog capture devices in order to get over a problem calld AntiAlising. This is not a Issue with digital cameras.

Why not? The ATI AIW Radeon 8500DV is an excellent card. It's roughly as fast as a GeForce3 Ti200 but includes a remote, full DVD acceleration, analog and digitial video capture, TV Tuner,etc. What else could you want? The AIW Radeon 8500DV has everything you could ever want in a multimedia system .

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

and PCCHIPS is as fast as a Asus A7M266
And have every thing in it, display card, Sound Card, Modem, Nic
What more do can you ask for ???

You are crying about the AGP bandwidh to be too small, putting tons of Ram on your display card to avoid several diferant problems and on the same time putting a Fire wire port on it....
Don't you see even a small problem here.....

Scuba and AMD Man,
Thank you for your opinions. Scuba, I understand and generally agree with the concept of avoiding one chip/board solutions. However, I am not a hardcore gamer and will not likely be upgrading my display care for the next few years. I thought that in this case an AIW card might be an OK idea. If the capture and encoding are going to be poor, then I would rather have 2 cards. If all I need is firewire and software, could I just get an SB Audigy card with firewire and use it to capture successfully? Would I be better off with stand alone firewire? Would I get better quality with card dedicated to capture? Could you recomend a specific card? Thanks again for your help.

There are more Issues to the Integrated cards then the quality and the fact that they are all on the same board.
I used to have tons of problems with Adobe Premier 6 untill I ditched my ATI Radeon 64DDR Vivo and got a matrox card.
Also as long as you capture using DV/Fire Wire then the quality is not a real Issue as it's all digital.
Generaly speaking you don't want a integrated solution and for more reasons.
Let's say that tomorow you will want to get a Good Capture card like the Pinnacle Pro-One or Canopus Pyro. some of this cards will not work good with another Fire wire in the computer. Will you ditch your Audigy ?

If you have a Analog source than in any case you can't use Fire wire, Unless you get a converter from analog to DV and that can be expencive.

It's a combination of what you have and how much you are willing to expend on it. (I use a 8K capture card for example)

Things to look at :
Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge - not sure about price (converter)
Canopus ADVC - 300$ (converter)
Canopus DV-Raptor 300$ (card - very recomended)
Pinnacle DV500+ - about 450$
Matrox RT 2500 - About 800$

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