I place this post knowing that I may get flamed as a heretic. I have been looking into building a new box to use for video capture, editing DV from my camcorder for family use, surfing, some gaming but I do not need intense 3D. Ideally, I want stability, simplicity, and speed. Waiting for ever for rendering etc will make me not likely to use the box. I was planning on building the following... Kt266a, Athlon XP 1800+, 512mb PC2100, RAID, either DV Raptor or ADS PYRO for capture, and WinXP Pro.

I cannot believe that I am even going to pose the question... A friend of mine has been needling me to get a new iMac. He says that they are better with DV and much more simple. All the software I would need is included. It also has DVD burner. He reports that they are incredibly easy to use and that my wife could even edit DVD without problems. Finally, my wife wants this box to go into a room where it would be hard to keep it away from small kids and she doesn't like all the cords/cables of a PC. Is my friend correct that an iMac can do quality DV editing straight out of the box? Are they fast? How would it compare to my proposed system above with regards to quality, simplicity, stability, and speed? How does the apple software compare with Adobe Premiere? Now, this is not to replace my current box, only to supplement. I am not considering going completely Mac. But have I gone completely mad?

go to ati web site
<A HREF="http://www.ati.com/na/pages/products/pc/aiw_radeon/index.html" target="_new">http://www.ati.com/na/pages/products/pc/aiw_radeon/index.html</A>

If the Dear ycs46241 will care to look,
we are talking here about DV. not shitty video quality integraded display cards.

Intel / AMD - <A HREF="http://www.llnl.gov/asci/news/white_news.html" target="_new">IBM are still the best</A>