Component Recommendations - Multimedia

Of course a sound card is today standard. There are a lot of different cards available, but if I wanted to play games on my computer I would insist on an original Creative Labs Sound Blaster. It's still the only card family which ensures that even all old DOS games like e.g. Wing Commander II or X-Wing work properly. Other cards may be better, there are excellent cards from Terratec or Turtle Beach, for example. But most of those cards are not 100% compatible to the Sound Blaster 16 standard, but only Sound Blaster or Sound Blaster Pro. This situation is changing now, since all new games are coming for Windows9x platforms. SoundBlaster compatibility is not an issue for those games anymore and sound cards come as PCI solutions today. Creatives new SoundBlaster Life is certainly an interesting product to look at, but Diamond's MX300 looks even better at a very interesting price point. Keep an eye on the drivers, not all cards will work with Windows NT!!!

Something else is becoming really hot now: It's the DVD . I recently bought the Guillemot DVD kit which included the Real Magic decoder card (PCI, analog loop through) and the Toshiba 5x DVD drive which also reads normal CDs like a 32x drive. I must confess that I'm really impressed! The TV output can be switched between PAL and NTSC and makes it possible to watch your favorite movies on a larger television screen.

But even without a decoder card the quality of software MPEG-2 decoding is still much better than CDi/MPEG-1 videos. You should have at least a Pentium II 300 MHz and a decent graphic card (ATI XPert 98 or a TNT board, for example) to decode the video data in real-time. The system will be busy almost 100%; using a Pentium II 450 makes this a bit better, but still it's almost impossible to run other performance intensive applications. So the DVD solutions with special decoder card seem to be much better in case you want to use it regularly, else it is wasted money. Creative Labs is also releasing a new Encore DVD kit with 5x drive now.

Advice For A Complete New Computer

This part of the article is meant to find out what you need or want to guide you to your very personal computer. First you have to think about your wishes and requirements; there are two classic mistakes which can happen when buying a computer: The first one consists in buying a super-cheap offer that initially sounds great and seems to provide enough performance and upgrade abilities. The second mistake is buying the fastest and biggest high-end computer, which is available, without thinking about the applications, you want to run. Of course you will most likely be happy with such a monster machine, nevertheless it's not particularly a good feeling to see that you have a powerful video card or gigantic hard drive that you do never really make use of and which gradually loses its value. Nobody needs a 16 MB video card for office applications.

My most important advice is the following: Never buy a component or a whole computer that you may need only a few months later. You will always get good offers thanks to the fast devaluation of computer components. A computer which is six months old loses about 30% of its value! A Pentium II CPU which today costs about $400 will be available for $250 in a few months. Just think about this, $150 can later be used for more RAM or other better components. Buy what you need right now. Realize that there is no such thing as a PC that's future proof for more than maybe 3 months.

If you want to get a Slot-1 system, please insist on getting a motherboard, which supports 100 MHz bus clock. It's important to keep upgrade paths open as long as possible. Also check that a computer with 64 MB RAM should be equipped with one 64 MB module, not with a pair of 32 MB types. Some manufacturers try to save money by using the cheaper 32 MB modules.

The same applies for the Celeron: There are two different 300 MHz Celerons available. Keep an eye on the "A", only this CPU has an integrated L2 cache of 128 kB.

Basically all available computers are fast enough to do common business tasks and to surf the web. The following three pages should correspond to your needs and requirements. Every profile is scaled into three budget types: Small budget, normal budget and unlimited budget.

I also have found a useful thing for the USB: Some days ago I saw the Creative Web Cam II. This is a small camera designed for video conferencing over the web or similar stuff. It is available as USB or as parallel version. I'm glad that I got the USB version since the data rate and thus the picture quality can be better.

Since the USB is a hot plug bus, just plug in the connector and Windows 9x detects it. The first time you have to install the drivers from the CD, and the next time the drivers will automatically be loaded when the cable is plugged in. The quality is of course far away from any kind of quality standard, but it is good enough to communicate with others over a local network or the internet. A picture grabbing function has been included as well: You can also make photos of max. 640x480, but the quality suffers from this resolution. A similar product is available from Philips, too.

All people who want real fine quality need to get a classic video camera and a video or TV card with line in or a combination card for 2D/3D/video editing and TV. A good TV card is the Hauppauge (does anybody know how to pronounce this name?) WinTV Radio. You shouldn't go for the Primio version since only the "Radio" type supports stereo. The card is a full TV tuner with line in and line out for all applications. And you don't lose any signal quality thanks to the TV card being a PCI bus master without requiring a loop through cable. Matrox offers a very attractive 2D/3D-video editing and TV card, called Marvel G200, which combines excellent video editing and a TV tuner with very good 2D quality and speed and pretty fast 3D acceleration.

Gaming, Office Applications, Internet, Programming

If you are a user who doesn't know exactly what will be the exact task for the PC, keep an eye on upgradeability. A Socket 7 board has to have all higher multipliers. If you want a Slot 1 system, be sure to get a BX board with PC-100 memory even if you do "only" use a Celeron. If you want to upgrade later, you just have to exchange the CPU. Be sure that you don't spend too much money on peripheral hardware you do not need (e.g. scanner). Better get them afterwards in case you really need it. The relation between price and performance has to be right.

Small budget:
CPU: AMD K6-2, 300 MHz or faster
RAM: 64 MB SDRAM
HDD: EIDE, 4 GB or bigger
Graphic: cards with Riva128 chipset, cards with Intel i740 chipset
Monitor: 17" or bigger

Medium budget:
CPU: AMD K6-2, 350 or 400 MHz (board with 1MB L2 cache) or Celeron A 300/333 (BX motherboard!) or Pentium II 300, 350 MHz
RAM: 64 MB SDRAM
HDD: EIDE, 4 to 8 GB
Graphic: Matrox Mystique G200, cards with Riva128 or Riva128ZX, cards with i740 chipset
alternative graphic: Matrox Procudtiva 8 MB AGP and Voodoo² board 12 MB
Monitor: 19", 90 kHz or more

Unlimited budget:
CPU: Intel Pentium II, 400 MHz or faster
RAM: 128MB SDRAM or more
HDD: EIDE, 8 GB or more (7200 rpm)
Graphic: Riva-TNT board, 3Dfx Banshee board. Maybe two additional Voodoo² boards 12 MB
Monitor: 19", 100 kHz or bigger

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