[AG-TECH] AG Grid dream system

[Douglas Baggett]

I've been thinking of the ultimate upgrade for our display and capture 
systems and I was wondering what others have put together. Currently here 
at NSF we are just using dual 1 Ghz processors with Matrox cards.

I'd love to pick up a couple of Xeon 2.6 Ghz processors, does anybody use 
these, what dual XEON motherboard do you recommend? The video card issue 
seems to be a bit dicey, it seems people REALLY love those matrox cards, 
but are the new NVIDIA or ATI cards any better or worse?

I have a Geforce 4 TI 4600 that has both DVI and VGA outs, so I could run 
two displays (even though the DVI would probably look better than the VGA), 
but I wonder if two display systems with their own AGP cards would be 
better for each display...

Of course you could go even futher with dedicated encoder cards and all 
sorts of other chrome, but compatibility with other sites kind of limits us 
since not everybody has a system that could handle full screen motion JPEG 
or HDTV at high bandwidth rates....or maybe I am wrong and lots of people 
could handle it :)

Just starting a discussion for thinking of how to get the video REALLY 
good. I'm competing with H.323 devices that companies like Polycom make, 
and at 2 Mb/s the Polycom video is broadcast quality and looks very good. 
The AG has so much more to offer, broadcast video quality can't be that far 
behind concidering how fast PC's and devices are lateley....

-Doug Baggett
Network/AG adminstrator
CISE/NSF