Recommended PC for ATI All In Wonder 7200?
 

Currently looking at an Dell OptiPlex 790 MT i5 2400 3.10 GHz 8GB RAM 500GB HDD (Which I will probably upgrade myself)

If I install an ATI All In Wonder and install Windows XP... Would this work without lag/dropped frames?
It also comes preinstalled with Windows 7 would I need to downgrade or upgrade the OS.

Thanks

Provided is a pic of the PC I am looking at

Going to be an easy "No" on that as the AIW 7200 is an AGP card and that Optiplex is almost certainly has PCI-Express only. Those predate any core iX processors, so you'd need to go with an either much older P4, or Core2Duo machine that does have an AGP stot to use the 7200.

What you could instead is use that PC along with the AIW USB 2.0 TV Wonder which still has the Theatre 200 chip that the better AIW cards have. Or you could use one of the PCI AIW cards that still have the Theatre 200 chip, but I'm told they aren not quite as reliable as the AGP variants. The AIW 2006 PCIe edition I messed with did get a lot warmer than the AGP AIW 9000 I had in a different machine. The USB variant can't do MPEG2 captures, but if your goal is to capture l

The other issue that you might run into is the Optiplex 790 may not have all Windows XP Drivers available for its hardware to make it run efficiently with all intended features.

I recently did a capture PC Build with a Optiplex 7010 MT and the drivers on the Dell Website said they worked with XP, but none of them would actually run stating something like that they were not a valid Win32 applications. I ended up just hunting around for the chipset drivers separately on other sites and eventually found drivers that seem to work for onboard audio, onboard graphics, etc so that no devices show as unrecognized in hardware manager anyway. I like the 7010 MT because it *can* work with XP and has USB 3.0 ports for faster data transfer which is important with file sizes like these, though you could always just plug whatever SATA drive directly into a USB 3 adapter, or just directly into the destination computer when you want to pull your files off onto an editing/postprocessing computer. The 7010 also has one normal PCI slot, so you could use a classic sound card like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz if you don't want to use onboard audio for the capture part.

Also keep in mind with XP that the machine won't be able to "see" more than 4GB of ram, so upgrading that won't help with anything.

Dropped frames are unlikely to be the fault of the capture PC (if using a 790) because most of the capture cards suggested were built to run on machines that were 5-10 years older than the 790. You can get dropped frames from not using a TBC though depending on how sensitive your capture card is to time base errors or if you're not capturing to a dedicated hard drive that is different from the one the OS is running on (unless it's an SSD). SATA HDDs should be plenty fast enough, but I'd probably put the OS on an SSD.

Then what is a good recommended PC that isn't too expensive that's like medium budget? :question:

Also I have heard those AIW TV Tuners USB devices are hard to find. I wonder which ones are good models. :hmm:

If you re-case it to a standard ATX case (~$65), with the Harbin Repair adapters for the Dell proprietary plugs (~$25), then this Dell will retrofit to the ATI AIW PCI setup (using the proper card, not any random PCI).

Onboard audio does not work for capture, separate card required. Some Dell only have 1x PCIe and 1x PCI, soyou're forced to use a cheap PCIe audio card. (No, avoid the PCIe ATI AIW cards.)

So the ideal setup must have 2x full PCI slots, for ATI + TBSC.

You can build vastly better systems, with hardware as recent as 2017, but it will cost more than the budget Dell route. I've built both before.

Drops are pretty much guaranteed without a proper TBC in the workflow. But drops can happen internal to the system, from bad I/O, due to drivers or drive. Avoid capturing to OS drive, instead get dedicated 2tb SATA HDD for capture in the XP system. 2tb SSD is possible, but it must be formatted on Win7/8/10/11 systems. I use drive trays, for easy removal.

All "AIW TV Tuners USB" are bad, aside from ATI 600 USB. But that card is lesser quality than an AIW. Almost everything is lesser quality than the AIW, which allows for capture of illegal values, and values more accurate. It's one of the best cards made for VHS capture, if you're willing to "suffer" through legacy XP desktops. But you can make it less bad, using newer hardware, and the unofficial XP Integral Edition.

Hmm. I wasn't aware any of the recommended cards being regular PCI? I'm pretty sure the 7200 is AGP only, or are there multiple variants of that? I wasn't aware that you could adapt AGP to anything else?

I haven't actually tried it, but if you use a PCIe AIW for capturing only (and not graphics), will it run cooler? This would make sense to do if your motherboard has onboard graphics I would think. My understanding is the main weakness of the PCIe is that the MMC won't show dropped frames if you need it for MPEG2 captures, but if you are doing a lossless capture with Virtualdub/Amarec, I imagine that it's just as good as other AIW cards capture quality-wise?

Variants, yes.
Adapt, no.
Cooler, no.
PCIe not just MMC, but offset, some shielding.

From what I've read, may be more ideal to go with an ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 as long as XP is being used? That uses the same Theater 200 chip, or does that have some disadvantage over the AGP AIW cards other than the lack of MPEG2 hardware accelerated encoding? For lossless capture, I'd image they perform the same?

Slight audio quality loss vs. TBSC.