Hi guys, this is my first thread so be kind :)

Ok so i am building a new editing computer and just want to run the spec and what i am expecting from it with you guys. Firstly i have already brought my mother board and two PCI-E graphics card, so unless the wont work full stop, i would really rather not hear about how crap they might be. Cheers

So my motherboard is a Sapphire Crossfire board to run two X1950 Pro Graphics card. My main concerns are how to operated this graphics cards so.....first question, should the card be 'crossifired'?? Or should they be separated?? I have two monitor as well, so should they being plugged into the master graphics card (in crossfire mode) or one in each Card???

Getting an AMD Am2 6000+ Processor in with 4Gd of corsair RAM.
Also i want a preview monitor for previewing a) captureing footage and B) whats on the Premiere 2.0 timeline. I have looked into a Pinnacle Studio MovieBox Plus to capture and preview. Any issue there?? With the graphics cards maybe?

Thanks guys, i know this is very basic stuff, but dont have to money just to trough away on hardware that isn't going to work.

Matt

Hi Matt,

I don't know that exact video card. Does it have dual outs on it? I would imagine if you run them in Crossfire mode, you only get the outs of one of the cards. If that's the case, I would keep them separate and use each card to drive one display and one of the cards to drive your preview.

I'm not sure that you'd need the Moviebox to capture and preview, if you're (presumably) capturing via firewire?

Eric

No they both have two outputs for multiscreen. I want the Pinnicle card for a preview monitor. Does anybody use no of these cards?

Matt, did you miss what I said?

I said if they do have 2 outputs each, use one to drive each monitor, and then use the second output of one for your preview. What does the Pinnacle device do that's so different and important? You have 2 dual-head video cards (4 outs) and don't want to spend a lot of money, yet you want to buy this other device for previewing (giving you *5* outs for 3 devices). Why?

Eric

No i didn't miss what you said. Sorry Eric, I didn't mean for that to sound like i was ignoring what you where saying. I was at work when i replied so i had to be quick, sorry.

Ok, so your saying that premiere will recognize a graphics card as a potential previewing device? Because atm on my old computer i cant get premiere to preview on my second monitor. However i only have one graphics card.

Im not that fussed on an extra £100 for the pinnicle card. If it will take abit of the work load on the graphics cards....then why not. But will there really be any advantages?

Oh i get you. Did they add that to CS3 by any chance? It seems like such a simple thing. I normally output to my tv via my camera and firewire, but I guess the Pinnacle unit would free up the camera? I haven't seen it, so I'm not sure what it has/does.

I guess Crossfire mode with the Pinnacle device would work the best, assuming you still get 2 outs from the main card in Crossfire mode?

I'm not sure if Crossfire is better for video or not. Because each display would contain something different. So you could get 100% performance x 2 separated, or I think it's about 180% performance if you combine them (I might be a little off here).. So you would get 90% x 2 I think if you Crossfired them? I haven't followed that technology that much to know the answer to this though.

Also, which OS are you running? XP has that 3 gig limit so the 4 gigs might not be fully utilized unless you go to XP 64 bit.

I hope I'm helping somehow here. :)

Yer thanks Eric. You've given me some stuff the research which is what i was looking for, cheers.

Any idea why Xp has limited RAM?

There's somewhat of an explanation in this pdf file:
http://h20331.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/downloads/RAM_Allocation_w-WinXP_HP_MWP_x64.pdf

Don't worry, it's only a page long. :)

CS3 (unless it's changed since May) is designed for a 32 bit OS, so it won't perform better under XP 64 bit. You won't lose any more than a gig of ram from the system you have because of the limitation described in the pdf file, but it still stinks. The other thing with changing to 64 bit XP is that everything needs a 64 bit driver and for some hardware, those are tough to come by.