Processor power

[swarmi]

just bought old pc, and even more recently; - got booted for having the wrong thread title from www.tweakguides.C**T!!! ??? >

having serveral problems please help, noob here!

1) system is slow, i have 192 (3x64) i need to pull one out and add a sdram 100>133mhz 512 in right??? the thing is do i worry about the ECC option?

2) I burn clips to cd-r, only because when i went to the shop, the guy said dvd-r/w drives need fast P4's?! true???..... well now i have to try fit Whole films onto cd, whats best for encoding and all that some Tech heads have like different programs for every step of that process, i just choose file to burn, choose PAL (not NTSC) and click burn, I got Nero with the cd-r/w drive, and have updated all the free stuff to get Nerostartsmart, Nerovision 3se, and Nero 6 i think. What (free) program is best for speed and quality, i hear that Nero is the best for interface, but i still dont find any options for aspect ratio? and vbr? whats aspect ratio for exactly?

[syphus]

Hi swarmi, welcome to itsallPC

I'm finding your questions a little difficult to understand...

With regard to your question about RAM; there are insufficient details about your system to come to any conclusions. How many DIMM (memory) slots do you have? What is the chipset?

For your second question, I can't understand most of it...but I can gather this much. It's not an entirely correct statement that DVD Writing requires a fast Pentium 4. It would be a true statement that very old systems (such as those most likely to be equipped with SDRAM such as yours) would have a lot of difficulty burning DVDs in a stable fashion. Any processor 1.0 GHz and over running Windows 2000 or later should be fine. I can inform you that aspect ratio is the pixel W:H for the target resolution. For example, normal TV/Monitor aspect ratio is 4:3. 16:9 is a widescreen format. When the aspect ratio is incorrect, the output will be stretched. Aspect ratio is usually automatically calculated by the resolution; it only needs to be manually set when the source files require correction.

For better quality support, you need to give more details about your system. Also, when typing your question, read over it and ask yourself "If I didn't know anything about this problem, could I understand it from what I've typed?"

[swarmi]

Thanks Syhpus, I'm really bad at grammar!

well, i have an Intel 44bx chipset, 3 dimm slots.

my system is a Giga-byte Ga-6bxc, Pentium 3 450Mhz, with 192 SDRam. ;D

I also have a Voodoo 3 Graphics card, i was wondering if you new about this, because i bought the whole thing second hand. Is the socket next to the monitor cable socket, the tv out? :-[

Dvd burning being out of the question, i don't suppose also you know how i can get my clips onto cd-r the fastest, and best quality? I use Nero6 (Oem) and so upgraded to Nero Startsmart and Nerovision 3Se and these programs don't let you edit the clip to fit on more than one cd. As for play back, i suppose asking for svcd or mpeg2 quality is fair. Have you heard if M4a, or mpeg4 has a good quality players for it yet? Because they might fit onto a cd-r better don't you think? ( i just been up all night reading up on file formats, and pixel sizes, frame rate's .. blah blah blah.)
:

[syphus]

Okay, for the Intel 440BX chipset, you would indeed get improved performance if you dumped all those old 64MB modules for a new PC133 512MB. However, this is only relative to the processor performance, so don't expect miracles.

Yes, what you're looking at on the back of the Voodoo 3 is probably TV out. This is an optional component to the Voodoo 3 specification though, so I couldn't be 100% sure. If it's a standard RCA or S-Video connection, it's a dead giveaway though.

One of the major hurdles to your plan of burning movies to CD is going to be your CPU performance. If you brutally compress something with mpeg4 to get it down to VCD size then it's going to look pretty bad, but it will also take your system several hours to re-encode the source files. Nero isn't really the software to use. For something cheap and easy to use, but fairly ok, look toward one of the ULead titles like Movie Factory or whatever.