asus k8 dx se mb dying avenues to replace improve

[trimurti]

My system currently is as follows asus k8 dx se mb-Athlon64 3000+ - 2 sticks kingston ddr 400-Nvidia 6100 128 with hdtv dongle-fusion 5 gold hdtv receiver card-creative sound blaster 2 zs-wd sata 2 500 g hd-eide wd jb 200 gig -4 external hds used for backup-new nec 16x all format dvd burner

Problems

mb is dying will no longer see dvd and frequently comes up with no os found and when it does boot takes about 3 minutes for grub to invoke so I can boot to xp or ubuntu
Seems to have at minimum bad controller.

Transcoding hdtv (1080i) takes an enormous amount of time for example 45 minutes (6 gig) takes 30 hours to transform to 4 gigs of xvid for dvd storage

I am broke and can not afford a total upgrade.

Tentative solution use inexpensive transition motherboards which will allow me to keep everything except cpu

an example would be the ASRock 775Dual-ViSTA Socket T (LGA 775) VIA PT880 PRO ATX Intel Motherboard .newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?DEPA=0&type=&Description=ASRock&Submit=ENE&N=0&Ntk=all
I could then upgrade to ddr2 and pciexpress then a new mb as I got the $$

My main concern is improving video transcoding speed. The MB is $57. A p4 3.2 is about $105 or I could get a dual core conroe 6600 for $312.

Please note the most rigorous game I play is solitaire.

My athlon was fine for everything I do except transcoding. Now I need to see how much difference in speed the 2 options offer. Is it best to go with the $162 or $369? If I go cheap now will I be better off with what I can buy in 18 months?

Any suggestions?

[danroyle]

right if you dont play games go for the conroe e6400 it will be plenty powerful enough for dvd encoding and is about $220

the asrock dual vista board is not bad it will do the job that you need


that would be what i would do in your situation

[trimurti]

right if you dont play games go for the conroe e6400 it will be plenty powerful enough for dvd encoding and is about $220

the asrock dual vista board is not bad it will do the job that you need


that would be what i would do in your situation

My problem is how much time would I save. transcoding hdtv at full resolution takes at least 5x the time as would a standard dvd. My athlon 64 3000+is pretty much the equil of the p4 3.2 except in the area of encoding/decoding where the 3.2 is markedly faster. So for the extra $100 how much faster in transcoding is the 6400 and extra $200 for the 6600.
In video overclocking is not really an option. so that is not a concern.

Thank you for your reply
Stan

[Clunk]

to give you a rough idea on the difference in encoding time.

Roughly 7 gig dvd encoded with cce 4 pass, nothing fancy, about 2 hours 20 mins on a 2.7ghz opteron 939 system. On an overclocked E6600 system @ about 3.0ghz, the time is around 1 hour 10 mins.

Dunno if this is what you were looking for, but it has been how i measure how fast my systems have been, right back to Athlon xp models.