On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 3:39 PM, Stephen Worthington <<a href="mailto:stephen_agent@jsw.gen.nz">stephen_agent@jsw.gen.nz</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
The PCI bus has very limited bandwidth when compared to the bandwidth<br>
used for video. That is why AGP and then PCIe were invented. A PCI<br>
bus has insufficient bandwidth to handle the video traffic for doing<br>
very much. </blockquote><div><br>At PAL resolutions you'd probably be ok, at least if your drive controller is on a separate PCI bus. PCI is 133MB/s and 720x576@50Hz works out to about 80MB/s. Of course if you're also trying to record from 2 tuner cards on the same bus you might have problems.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">AGP is *much* better, especially AGP 2X and AGP 4X. Your<br>
hardware old enough that it is unlikely to support 4X, but if it has</blockquote><div><br>AGP 4X came out in '99 or 2000, I don't think the motherboard is quite that old.<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
an AGP slot, you really need to use an AGP card, not a PCI one. There<br>
should be cheap ones available on TradeMe. Watch out for the voltage<br>
specs - AGP is 5V, and I think AGP 4X is only 3.3V, which older PCs do<br>
not support.<br>
</blockquote></div><br>You'll have to be careful as it's been awhile since 3.3V AGP cards were common. I think most nVidia FX5200's support it, but newer cards will probably only support 1.5V AGP.<br><br>Cheers,<br>
Steve<br>