Hey guys, I've usually done pretty well with older hardware, it usually does everything that I'd like for it to do. I'm not into high-powered games (I used to play Quake III every once in a while) but I've found one thing that I need a more powerful computer to do: capture video from my digital video camera. I have been thinking of upgrading my secondary PC with a new motherboard and processor so I can use it to capture video and write out VCDs or DVDs.

My secondary PC is a NCR 3272 minitower with a Pentium II 350mhz processor. I haven't done a ton of stuff with hardware upgrades except for HD and memory upgrades, so I have a few questions:

1. How do I identify the type of motherboard that will fit into this case? I think it's an ATX form factor, but is there a way for me to tell for sure?

2. What would be the most cost-effective path for me to achieve my goal of capturing digital video and writing VCDs/DVDs? What processor class should I be looking at, and what socket type, etc. I am not biased towards any one type of processor, I just need it to do what I want it to do. Are there any popular processor/mobo combinations that I should be researching?

3. What are the integration issues I will run into? Any advice on avoiding common gotchas?

Thanks!

In answer to question #1
On an ATX motherboard, there will be one power supply connector to the board. On an AT motherboard, there will be two connectors.

That is the way I tell.

Some of the newer ATX boards have two connectors as well now.

The ATX connector itself has two rows of 10 pins.
The ATX auxilary connector is a 2x2 connector and is used to supply extra power for the CPUs.

An AT board however will have two connectors with one row of 6 pins each. Remember to keep the black wires together in the middle.

A quick reasonably reliable way of telling what type of board you've got is to look at the back.
If the keyboard socket, serial port etc.. is mounted on a little rectangular removable plate then it's ATX.
If they're actually part of the casing then it's quite likely it's an AT board.

The NCR 3272 Minitower is very very likely an ATX based machine

The most cost effective way of capturing digital video is to find a motherboad with built in FireWire/IEE1394 and buy some fast HDs. I've captured video using a Sony VAIO with 350MHz PII before so a processor isn't a major consideration. It's just slooooow when processing it.

Thanks, Trevor, this gives me a place to start.

The reason why I wanted to get a faster machine is to both capture video and process it. I did buy a Firewire card for my primary machine (P3 750 laptop with a docking station that accepts PCI cards) and that setup did not work well. I could capture about 30 seconds of video and then the machine would freeze, forcing me to kill the task. I suspect it is mostly because I'm capturing on a laptop through the docking station and writing out to a slow drive.

Eventually I would like to burn DVDs and I was under the impression that it took a fast machine (P4 or so) to burn DVDs effectively.

It would have been simpler to buy a CardBus Firewire/IEEE1394 card They're more expensive however than a PCI Firewire card. What did you use as the capture software? For basic stuff I've used Ulead VideoStudio which came with my desktop Firewire card. I wasn't doing anything particularly fancy, just capturing the video off my DV camera and recompressing it.

The main requirements for an easy capture are: Fast CPU so you don't need to wait too much. Lots of memory for processing and large HDs to save it all.

Basically, buy the best one you can justify/afford and make sure it's got lots of disk space. It'll eat about 1GB every 10 minutes or so. Capturing the video is easy. It's processing it that takes a lot of time and CPU power.

A P4/Athlon isn't necessary for DVD burning. I know somebody who has a DVD writer attached to their P3 600 and it works fine. You don't want to be doing anything else whilst it's capturing or burning though.

To be honest, what would you be keeping from the old machine?

The HDs will need to be upgraded as you won't have enough space. The CPU and RAM won't fit the new motherboard. And the graphics card whilst it will fit will be slow (assuming proper voltages). That only leaves the casing, CDROM/DVD drives and any expansion cards really.

So it might be a better idea to just reuse the monitor, keyboard and mouse...

You might consider just purchasing a hardware based MPEG-2 card. They aren't exactly cheap, but if you're going to be doing a lot of encoding it will greatly decrease your time spent waiting. Also, it doesn't require an overly expensive machine to go along with it.

To be honest, what would you be keeping from the old machine?

You know, you're right. I guess I usually think in terms of re-use, rather than buy new, but in this case it really isn't that much more expensive to buy a complete PC. I know I can always use the PII as one thing or another, so it wouldn't be wasted

Thanks for all the responses!

Hmm, perhaps, perhaps not.

I recently helped a friend upgrade an old Dell. We reused the case, power supply, floppy, and monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Kept the old hard drive as a backup, and old CD drive to use for CD to CD burning. Here's about how the prices broke down:

Athlon motherboard (built in USB 2.0, Firewire, LAN, and 5.1 sound) - $70
Athlon XP 1700 - $50 (Retail version, came with fan)
Geforce4 MX440 - $40
RAM - 512MB DDR - $65
Hard Drive (40GB, 7200 RPM) - Free after rebate (Office Max)
48x CD Burner - Free after rebate (also Office Max)

Anyhow, by browsing the ads in the Sunday paper and getting to the stores shortly after they opened (and some mail order from www.newegg.com ) We revamped the entire original computer for about $250. I'd suspect you can do something similar (add a DVD burner for under $150) and come in for significantly less than new.