computer bros, what would be the better upgrade??

[TC2]

I have a gift certificate to best buy burning a hole in my pocket.

I have a fast computer 3 GHz Hyperthreading processor, 768MB, and crappy onboard video.

Should I get more ram or a cheaper video card?

I do absolutely no gaming on this computer, I mostly use it for video and picture editing, watching movies, web surfing etc.

What should I get?

 

[buffer1]

I would say Ram

 

[redguru]

I have a gift certificate to best buy burning a hole in my pocket.

I have a fast computer 3 GHz Hyperthreading processor, 768MB, and crappy onboard video.

Should I get more ram or a cheaper video card?

I do absolutely no gaming on this computer, I mostly use it for video and picture editing, watching movies, web surfing etc.

What should I get?

If you do picture and video editing, I suggest getting an ATi card with tv in/out.

 

[TC2]

I'll probably eventually get both, I really dont mess with recording or sending anything out to my tv.

I mostly make movies,edit them, burn dvds stuff like that.

 

[lardo5150]

you have over 512mb of ram, so that is cool.
If you are doing pics and editing, go with the vid card.

 

[blut wump]

You give very little information here. As a general rule, though, more ram will speed everything up. If you're running XP, you should notice a pleasant speed boost with extra ram. If you're still running DOS 3.0, I'd go for the video card.

 

[TC2]

You give very little information here. As a general rule, though, more ram will speed everything up. If you're running XP, you should notice a pleasant speed boost with extra ram. If you're still running DOS 3.0, I'd go for the video card.

Sorry

Windows XP
3GHz Pentium 4 Hyperthreading processor.
768MB PC3200 DDR memory.
Shitty onboard video "Intel Extreme Graphics 2" (96MB memory).

I do quite a bit of video encoding and editing so I figured the video card would be a bottle neck on a fast system.

 

[GoldenDelicious]

id save the voucher for when you really need it. personally, it sounds like you need niether, and the purchase would be superfluous

also, unless i misunderstand things, video editing and encoding have little to do with your video card - the vid card is there to chew up data and spit out a signal to a monitor, thats it. encoding and changing images etc is all processor/cache/ram/harddrive stuff. if anything id think that your harddrive would be your bottleneck

cheerios

 

[blut wump]

If you're just ripping and recoding DVDs and doing little else with the machine then it's probably fine. If you were to get more ram then I'm sure the machine would be little snappier and you could allocate some more ram to video. Get yourself another gig and bump the video memory to 256. The extra video memory should leave Windows less likely to cache icons and the like.

Editing video chews a lot of ram, so much that GD is right in that the HD becomes the bottleneck. If you already have a reasonabe HD, though, some extra ram is likely to help. At least the programs can allocate larger buffers to work with.

 

[Dial_tone]

absolutely RAM - you want at least 1GB and 2GB if you will keep that computer til Windows Vista comes out. A 64-bit OS will take more RAM.