sda capture blog

when we were moving into the new apartment in august of 2004, it became clear to us that i was the one who needed the insane speed of her new pc, which she had just built with her parents' money. therefore, i traded with her, loaning her my old athlon 1.1 ghz for her athlon 64 3400+. i ended up upgrading the machine several times, giving it a second dvd writer and several 250 gig hard drives. i never really liked the thing, though, mostly because it wasn't mine, and because it had a few kooky hardware problems that i was never able to track down (it doesn't help when running the program inside a debugger stops it from crashing).

a few days ago, she announced that she had bought quake 4 and wanted her machine back to play it. i knew that my old pc is actually something like eight times slower than hers, meaning that it would take eight days to export a run that takes just over 24 hours to export now. it was time to kick my upgrade plans into high gear.

i had been saving since classes started this semester for a new "sda beast," but i had been planning on waiting until january or even later to actually buy it. i spent about an hour on the phone with my parents last night, and i was able to get them to push my graduation gift back from may to the present time, ensuring that i can buy the new machine now, and averting potential disaster as runs continue to come in at a rate that is certainly brisker than one per week.

but what should it be? dad was quick to point out that since 2004, prices on custom built brand-name units have continued to fall, but prices on individual parts (such as cpus) have not. we seem to have hit a wall where it's cheaper to buy a bare bones pc from hp or dell than to buy the exact same parts and assemble it yourself. he said that he thought it was because the "microsoft tax" the pc manufacturers pay has gone down so much, but to me the reason is irrelevant; i just wanted to know how i could get the most power for the least money.

and so i went to the hp site and customized a d4100e series pavilion, the highest powered one i saw with amd inside. (as anyone following the cpu wars knows, intel is not a good buy right now.) i selected the fastest cpu available, an amd 64 dual core 4200+. it came to about $1,100 after a buttload of rebates. i agreed to pay $400 of it, and my parents would shoulder the rest. but then i noticed something: there was no agp slot on this motherboard! my all-in-wonder capture card is agp ... so that meant either back to the drawing board or buying a new capture card.

luckily, it looks like i can get the all-in-wonder x800 xl (a pci express 16x card) for less than $150, and my parents also agreed to pay for it. because i'll be at my parents' around christmas, i decided to wait a few days to ensure that the new sda beast is not delivered during that time and has to wait in the cold for me to come home. thus, i'll have my first reports and captures from the new machine right at the end of the year. at this point i can only imagine what improvements the folks at ati have made to their all-in-wonders over the past two years.

incidentally, radix is probably the biggest winner in all of this: he gets my old 1.1 ghz athlon with motherboard and all-in-wonder. what's so special about that, you ask? well, if you weren't aware, he's currently using a 450 mhz computer ... a cd-rom drive that can't even read 700 mb discs ... and a capture device ... well, i wouldn't even call that thing a capture device. suffice to say that he's going to have a blast capturing his own awesome runs with my old hardware.