Friday, December 17, 2004
Building a Digital Media Editing Powerhouse: The Missing Piece Acquired (Part One)
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 11:00 AM
More than a month ago, Shuttle sent me an SN95G5 XPC to review...and it's been sitting there gathering dust. :( I requested parts from some of my favourite companies: Kingston sent me 2 GB of RAM, and Western Digital sent me two 74 GB 10,000 RPM Raptor drives. AMD doesn't have a CPU loaner program, so I bought an AMD 3500+ CPU (the price jump to the 3800+ was brutal!).
The missing piece was the video card, and it took forever to solve: I needed the fastest video card that would work (and fit) in the Shuttle, but it also had to support dual DVI connectors. That's harder to find than you might think, at least where I live. I tried all the local vendors, but most stared at me blankly when I said I needed dual DVI. I finally decided on the card that I wanted, the XFX GeForce 6800GT: the Ultra wouldn't fit in the Shuttle, so I settled on the GT flavour of the card. I emailed XFX for a review loaner, but they didn't even have the courtesy to give me "no" for an answer - nothing but silence. A bit rude.
At any rate, I then started searching for ANYONE to sell me that card - and boy did I have a hard time! I found two places in eastern Canada that had the card, but they didn't accept credit cards - I'd have to make a trip to the bank and get a money order. :? I then widened my search to include US-based vendors that would ship the card into Canada - trust me, there aren't many of those. I found eCost, however, and managed to order the card. By the time it got off backorder, and managed to find it's way to me, it took a full two weeks. But now I have the card and can start assembling the system. In part two, I'll talk about why I chose the parts I did, and what my goals are with building this system. For now, I'm just happy I finally got my hands on that darn video card!
The missing piece was the video card, and it took forever to solve: I needed the fastest video card that would work (and fit) in the Shuttle, but it also had to support dual DVI connectors. That's harder to find than you might think, at least where I live. I tried all the local vendors, but most stared at me blankly when I said I needed dual DVI. I finally decided on the card that I wanted, the XFX GeForce 6800GT: the Ultra wouldn't fit in the Shuttle, so I settled on the GT flavour of the card. I emailed XFX for a review loaner, but they didn't even have the courtesy to give me "no" for an answer - nothing but silence. A bit rude.
At any rate, I then started searching for ANYONE to sell me that card - and boy did I have a hard time! I found two places in eastern Canada that had the card, but they didn't accept credit cards - I'd have to make a trip to the bank and get a money order. :? I then widened my search to include US-based vendors that would ship the card into Canada - trust me, there aren't many of those. I found eCost, however, and managed to order the card. By the time it got off backorder, and managed to find it's way to me, it took a full two weeks. But now I have the card and can start assembling the system. In part two, I'll talk about why I chose the parts I did, and what my goals are with building this system. For now, I'm just happy I finally got my hands on that darn video card!
