video card vs onboard video

[herrjimbo]

here's my situation. i have a 775 mb p4 3.0 w/ 2 gigs ram running xp pro for my surveillance system. if i install an ati radeon x1300 pro will there be a significant increase in clarity for viewing and playback as opposed to onboard?

just want to clear up the imaging. is it worth the $25 expense?

many thanks if i can get a definitive answer.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Your "clarity" is limited by the camera resolution not, the video card.

 

[herrjimbo]

thanks for the answer. maybe clarity is the wrong word. when i hook the cameras up to a television, it's as clear as looking out a window. going through the computer, for playback as well as monitoring, it loses quite a bit of sharpness.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

thanks for the answer. maybe clarity is the wrong word. when i hook the cameras up to a television, it's as clear as looking out a window. going through the computer, for playback as well as monitoring, it loses quite a bit of sharpness.

I got you. What MB do you have? What is the onboard video chipset?
Generally, $25 isn't enough to see any improvement but, your system seems pretty old so, it may be worth it.

 

[herrjimbo]

the graphics: 82945g express chipset family

motherboard: all i know is it's an intel 775 board

ibm thinkcentre

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

It says

Up to 2048x1536 resolution for both analog and digital displays

for the onboard video but, the X1300 is considerably faster. Your resolution problems may be a function of the software you're using but, for $25, I'd get X1300.

 

[herrjimbo]

thank you magnus, you've been a great help!

 

[Arkaign]

No, don't do it! I just went through this with two totally different systems.

Those security cam systems work like this :

The camera itself (depending on quality of course) will generally output a very clear signal. The signal that goes over the cable to the DVR PC is also quite good, but once it gets processed by the DVR card the quality generally is fairly poor. Better DVR card = better quality. You'd have to have a pretty righteous DVR card to get to the point where you'd need a better video card to go along with it.

DVR cards are a huge mixed bag. I recommend shopping them on Amazon and paying very close attention to the reviews. For the place I was installing/upgrading at, we needed 16 channels for the video, and ended up going with a PCI-Express x1 card that supported windows 7 64 bit, coming from a PCI card that supported only 8 channels with relatively terrible performance.

It was similar to this :

http://www.amazon.com/Geovision-GV-1...s=pci+dvr+card

But notice for all the great features, that card doesn't support 64-bit windows. This kind of sucks for a few reasons.\

Anyway, ideally you want something that will do at least VGA resolution for each channel at 30FPS.

 

[herrjimbo]

already ordered it. will be here wednesday. who knows, maybe it'll give me just enough satisfaction. i could always play coduo.

 

[Arkaign]

already ordered it. will be here wednesday. who knows, maybe it'll give me just enough satisfaction. i could always play coduo.

Well, it's not a lot of money, but it won't make any difference for DVR functions. For reference, if your onboard video will play a DVD, it also won't have any problem with any non-HD DVR display, and HD DVR of 8+ channels is $$$$$$$. Any socket 775 onboard video will be more than good enough for DVR duty.

It certainly won't hurt, but it won't help either, unless your video drivers for the onboard aren't loaded for some reason and you're running it as a generic VGA adapter

After you go through getting the new card and seeing that it's exactly the same DVR performance, look at DVR card replacements

 

[herrjimbo]

could very well be that it's running generic. cpuz has no information whatsoever for graphics. i might just get lucky.