Dan Rutter's back on-site to rebuild the mess you've made of your brand new, real-real-shiny PC. Or old, smells-like-ozone VAC. As ozone-leaking components are bad things, you'd best replace them with an odourless and awesome MX700, won every month by IOOTM.
IOOTM: Goodbye to VHS
I: I am interested in buying a video card mainly for recording television/video. There are 2 cards that I am choosing from, the 64 MB All-In-Wonder RADEON 9000 PRO ($423) and the 128 MB All-In-Wonder RADEON 9700 PRO ($749). I have read that both use the same Rage Theatre 200 chip and the same Philips tuner.
Therefore, my question to you is, will the uber-powerful 256 bit memory controller of the 9700 PRO offer better quality recordings compared to the lower 128 bit memory controller of the 9000 PRO?Stephen Q
O: Yes, those two cards do have the same tuner and video decoding hardware. So, for that matter, does the cheaper RADEON 7500-based All-In-Wonder VE.
The 9700's a much more powerful 3D card than the 9000 PRO, but its memory controller doesn't do a thing for video encoding.
The AIW 9700 PRO is, however, a slightly more capable video capture card, because the R300 core of the 9700 has a "Cobra MPEG-2 engine" which takes a bit of the load off the CPU when you're encoding video. ATI claim it can reduce CPU load by as much as 25%, but in reality 10% seems to be about the most you're going to see. Certainly less than 20%.
No current processor has any trouble with even ten megabit per second MPEG-2 encoding in real time. If your CPU is faster than an original model P4 (or 1GHz Athlon), you'll be fine without the extra help.
Real 'capture cards' (generally meant for video editing systems) have on-board encoders that do MPEG-something or Motion JPEG (which is easily editable - MPEG isn't), and don't require any CPU time to do it.
CPUs are so fast these days though, that you just don't need this extra hardware for basic 'digital VCR' purposes.
The R300 core also provides a 'VideoSoap' function to reduce noise in low quality incoming video, which gives a better picture and a smaller MPEG file. This uses considerable CPU power as well, though, and it's no use if the video isn't actually noisy.
Must. . . go. . . faster. . .
I: In the last year or so, we have seen the speed of CD burners crawl up from 8X to 52X, but the reading speed hasn't improved much, if at all! Why is this? Have companies given up going faster?
Personally I would like it to be higher, as most games and software are still on CDs and multiple CDs (Enter the Matrix, for example) take forever to install! Norton Ghost could run faster with a faster CD read speed, thus decreasing the time spent on reinstalling after a fatal crash.
Have companies called it quits at 52X speed? Is it impossible to go faster?Kenny
O: Yes, 52X is a bit of a limit. 52X CD-ROM readers have been around for a long time; recently, burners that can do the same speed in write mode (in theory at least, with good enough media and when the phase of the moon is favourable) have turned up too.52X isn't a barrier like the speed of light; you could make a drive that worked faster, and someone probably will. But it's getting very difficult, because CD-ROM discs are not manufactured to the same tolerances as hard disk platters, and they're not as strong, either.
At a glance, a CD looks very nicely round and the hole in the middle looks very nicely centred. But it's not perfectly round, and there's probably stuff printed on it too, which can further spoil its centre of gravity.
If you start spinning such an imperfect disc really quickly, you're going to get vibration. Quality CD- and DVD-ROM drives have clamps that centre the disc very well, and many of them also have vibration damping gadgets of one kind or another. But there's only so much you can do.
It's also possible for discs to actually fly apart if you spin them too fast. Yes, even though they're made of super-tough polycarbonate.
Full '52X' rotational speed is fifty-two times the minimum rotational speed of the original '1X' CD-ROM drives, which spun at the same speed as audio CD players. 1X is 210 revolutions per minute - that's how fast an audio CD player spins when it's playing the very end of a completely full disc. It spins faster at the beginning of the disc, (because CDs are recorded from the middle out and the data rate per unit length of track is constant), but the 'X' figures are all multiples of the minimum 1X speed, because that makes the numbers more impressive.
Modern CD-ROM drives don't use the old drives' Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) variable-speed system; they stick to Constant Angular Velocity (CAV), and spin at the same RPM no matter what part of the disc they're dealing with. CD writers may vary their speed if they're writing at a speed below their maximum mechanical capacity, so as to maintain much the same data rate over the whole disc, but they don't necessarily.
Anyway, 52X is 10920 RPM. Which is bloody fast. A CD has a circumference of 377mm; 10920 x 377mm/m equals 247km/h, around twice the edge speed of a circular saw. At this speed, a weakness in a disc can, at a random moment, produce a loud noise and a drive full of CD fragments. Going faster only makes vibration and exploding-CD problems worse.
We're already at the point where some drives default to a reduced speed 'quiet' mode; you have to power them up with a button held down to get them to run at the full sticker speed.
Powering on
I: I own an older server case with 300W redundant Power Supply Units, and I wonder if it is possible to use it with a new Pentium 4 mobo? There is a spare P2 AUX plug. Can I use it with a proper adapter? Maszko
O: Yes, provided the PSU has an ATX plug for its main output. The four pin ATX12V "P4 connector" on most motherboards today is just for extra 12 volt power; you can buy inexpensive adapters that let you use a standard "Molex" drive power plug for that.
HT hope springs eternal
I: In issue 23 there was an article about P4 hyper-threading, in that article it stated that all P4's had hyper-threading built into them, so does that mean my Willamette core P4 1.5GHz with 256KB of cache can be hyper-threaded too? Van Kansaki
O: The only P4s with HT are the 800MHz FSB chips (the "C" models), and the 3.066GHz 533MHz FSB P4, which was the flagship chip before the 800MHz bus P4s arrived. No other P4s have HT.
HT isn't worth getting tremendously excited about, anyway. It does provide a small speed boost, generally, provided your operating system and motherboard and are able to turn it on, which is not a problem for Win2000/XP and pretty much any current Socket 478 board. But a P4 with HT is not the same as a real dual-processor system. Both HT pseudo-processors are competing for the same resources from the cache level on downwards, which massively bottlenecks their performance.
Compression swindle?
I: I am a Telstra dial-up customer. I was looking at my dial-up connection and noticed the compression setting. This got me wondering if I'm doing them a favour by compressing my data, but do they compress the data they send to me? According to my Dial-Up status dialog, no, which means I chew through my available megabytes quicker than if I did. Also, wouldn't this apply to broadband customers too? Why doesn't Telstra and for that matter any other ISP use compression on their end? Heath Dimmack
Issue: 133 | February, 2012