Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic - Re: Radeon 9700 PRO= Sweet

Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic

by Motherhead 01/12/2003, 9:23pm PST

I was so delighted that ATI finically lifted it's driver/hardware curse that I picked up a 9700 All-in-Wonder and plopped in into a Shuttle SS51G with a 2.0 GHz P4 (most cost effective), 512MB of PC2100 RAM, a fast 80GB HD and a Pioneer DVR-A04.

The point was that I had a Viewsonic PJ551S projector laying around, certainly not projecting anything. The ATI part has HDTV out, the Viewsonic can sync HDTV so that was the point.

I have not played with all the features, but when all the software is installed, I will have a 12' (how much naked white wall I have) HDTV that is hooked up to Digital Cable, Plays DVD and VCD, Has PVR to HD and then HD to DVD recording abilities, and is dripping with USB 2.0 and Firewire ports, all on a little
unit atop my stereo rack.

by the way for audio I will probably drop an Audigy 2 into the single PCI slot, but I wanted to see how good the onboard Audio (Optical in/out) would sound. I was also weary of another hardware+driver install when I was playing with so many new (to me) devices. At any rate it was simple to Optical out from the Shuttle box to my Yamaha A/V receiver and it outputs 5.1 just fine, sounds quite good.

I realize only a couple of days ago Maximum PC built something just like this on a Shuttle based on an Athlon and nVidia's new nForce2 MB, which i am pissed that I didn't even know existed, yet I thought you might want to know that you can run out and do the same thing with off the shelf components today. Without access to alpha hardware and beta drivers that MaximumPC has. (dicks)

total cost (sans projector)

ATI 9700 All-in-Wonder: $380.00
Shuttle board/case Cube: $325.00
2.0 GHz P4: $180.00
80GB 7200RPM HD: $90.00
Pioneer DVR-A04: $250.00
Crucial 512MB PC2100: $130.00
Wireless Keyboard/Mouse: $60.00

= 1410.00

Playing Unreal Tournament 2003 on a wireless keyboard/mouse at 1024x820 over a 12 foot wall: Priceless.

Better then this motherfucker? (I also just heard about): Maybe. I have better hardware, they have WinXP Media Center and Engineers... dicks.