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December 14, 2005

upgrade + tax

decided on the ati tv wonder elite instead of the 3x more expensive all-in-wonder. interesting about this card are two things: it supposedly has ati's latest tuner, which makes analog cable signals look like they came off of a dvd, and there are apparently mac drivers for it. perhaps i will be able to capture in os x on the new sda beast sooner rather than later.

i bought the card today from buy.com for $106.66 and the machine from hp for $1099.00 ($949.00 after rebates). full specs on the machine below:

HP Pavilion d4100e customizable Desktop PC
* - Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Home Edition with SP2
* - AMD Athlon(TM) 64 X2 4200+ dual-core - 2.2GHz
* - FREE UPGRADE from 512MB to 1024MB 400MHz (2x512)
* - 80GB 7200 rpm SATA Hard Drive
* - FREE UPGRADE from CD-RW to 16X DVD+/-R/RW
* - Front USB, FireWire IEEE 1394 and audio ports
* - NVIDIA GeForce 6200SE w/TurboCache 256MB support
* - Integrated 5.1 Capable Sound w/ front audio ports
* - HP Multimedia Keyboard, HP Optical Mouse

will be adding to it either two or three of my maxtor 250 gig ata/133 drives, my sony dru-710a dual layer burner, my soundblaster and the tv wonder elite. two of the maxtor 250s will form a raid 0, because i highly doubt that one of them by itself can serve the huffyuv fast enough to avoid becoming a bottleneck. (with the newly-released divx 6.1 it'll use both cores for a single job, increasing my encoding speed from amd 3400 to amd 8400.) operating systems will be windoze xp 64-bit and mac os x, as soon as they crack the release version of x86 tiger so that it runs on non-apple-blessed hardware.

Posted by njahnke at December 14, 2005 11:32 PM

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