desperate: i have to change my aiw, which way to go?

[jeremypps]

hi everybody, i'm in deep trouble and i hope somebody can help.
first of all: sorry for my terrible english.
i have an athlon 900 on a via 133a mb and my video/capture card is a ati aiw 128 agp 32mb.
yesterday i've bought a new motherboard (gigabyte 7va) and an athlon xp 1800, when i came home i had a surprise: my ati is not compatible with this motherboard, in fact it doesn't even fit into the agp slot, because it's 2x and the slot is only for 4x/8x cards (in the online shop wher i've bought the mobo the specs said 2x/4x/8x ... i'm gonna kill'em ...).
so i have 2 choices: get back the mobo and change with another one (but it seems they are all via kt400 based with agp 4x/8x) or get a new video/capture card.
i don't have enough money to afford a aiw 8500, they seem not to sell it anymore and may be in 3 years i will have the same problem, may be with agp 1200x slot or wtf they will push into the market.
so the question is:
- do i have to look for an aiw, maybe the 7500 one?
- do i have to look for a tv tuner and a video card separately? if so, are all tv tuners good the same?
- does any of you have experience with VIVO cards, like sapphire 9000 radeon (that is sold here in italy for 120 euro)? if so, are you satisfied?
the third solution is the one that would fit my needs (i don't need a tv tuner, i will use my vcr) but i didn't read any comment about these cards; i've bought one for my wife' sister, but still have to try to make it work for capturing.
i really hope somebody can give me a ray of light, any way i thank you all, cheers, jeremy.

[dar1us]

hi..dont worry about ure english:)

Radeon 7500's, i heard good things about the radeons and the way they capture. Apparently they kick ass (for what you pay), says... dare I say it, someone over at ... VCDHELP.

If you just want a card that can capture however, i reccomend just getting a simple PCI Composite In/S-Video in. Some have tuners but they are not really needed. Depends what you want to do, if you can export video from whatever you are capturing from via S-Video or Composite (prefferably the first) then you dont need a tuner. Tuners allow you to plug in some antenna type of thing like here in the UK, an aerial but in the US, you can buy Cable-ready tuners, but I dont know much about that.

It is your decision, but your hard-ware seems good enough to use basically what you like. You need a card which works in Virtual Dub or it had better have some damn good software with it:). You really want the ability to capture up to 720x576 for obvious reasons, it is basically the highest used res you can think of in the land of European capturing, in the US they have HDTV, but I dont know much about that either. Just 1080i or something like that?!

You also want a card which people say good things about, also for obvious reasons.

enjoy looking


dar1us

[jeremypps]

dar1us, thanks a lot for you kind reply.
here in italy it seems they burned all aiw radeon card, there isn't any shop that sells these cards anymore.
last time i saw a 7500 in an online shop it was about 280 euro, a little too expensive, but if it's worth the price...
for soccer world cup in korea/japan i bought a terratec tv value card to put into my pc at work, so i could watch games while working.
now i have this card at home, i've tried to install it yesterday under winme, it works with virtualdub but no vertical res above 288.
so i've tried to install the alternate drivers for bt8x chipset based cards. result: the software that came with the card doesn't start anymore, virtualdub can capture at higher vertical res but too many fames lost and no overlay avaible, only preview.
if this card would do the job it would be perfect, but it seems i'll have some problems, i'll do some more tries, but the perfect situation would be no aiw installed and clean os, this is quite difficult to obtain, but i'll try ...
many thanks again !
of course, if somebody out there owns a vivo card ...