how much of a bottleneck is the video card?

[staalburger]

Hi

I'd like to know how much of a performance difference a video card makes? I'll be using very limited vodeo functionality, 2cd and divx/dvd movies. Can I buy a sis645 mobo and a sis 6326 card or would it be better to buy the integrated sis650 chipset? The only memory real intensive work the pc will do is divx encoding. Am I correct in saying that the video card won't make much difference on it and with a 1.6a the performance hit, if any, would barely be noticed.

Thanks

 

[jcmkk]

The video card only the biggest bottleneck when playing 3D games. 2D functionality should be fine with integrated video, but I don't know about divx and movies because I don't do that kind of thing on my PC. Even if you don't think you would use it, I would still suggest buying a seprate graphics card. Radeons are really good a DVD and 2D, so you might wanna check out a Radeon LE or something along those lines. You don't save that much going with integrated, but you do lose a lot of quality and expandability.

 

[astroview]

Yea, video cards are usually only important for 3d, but the 2d on Matrox is considered excellent and the best. For what you need, the Video card wont' matter much, but if you want good 2d consider a Matrox. Newer Ati cards have good MPG and DVD playback I've heard, so that is an option. For encoding them, the card shouldn't matter.

 

[Mavrick007]

<< I'll be using very limited vodeo functionality, 2cd and divx/dvd movies... The only memory real intensive work the pc will do is divx encoding. Am I correct in saying that the video card won't make much difference on it and with a 1.6a the performance hit, if any, would barely be noticed. >>



For watching DVDs especially I would make sure that you have a good video card like an ATI that is accelerated for DVD, but it dosen't have to be their top of the line. For memory intensive work like encoding DIVx, it shouldn't take any hit on the machine from the video, it will be more of the memory and processor that will matter more as well as your hard drive. Yes, the performance hit with a P4 1.6a should be very minimal for what you want to do so I would just get some basic vid card with hardware assist for DVD and you should be fine.

If it's games, then that's another story, the video card can become the bottleneck quite quickly.