I come from the flip side of Alan's arguments.
I took the decision not to buy dedicated hardware. My personal reasons are:
1) I have a fast PC anyway. My machine will output 1-pass MPEG2 at just over a 1:1 ratio (but I normally use a 2-pass VBR anyway).
2) I use Magic Bullet quite a lot, which isn't supported by the card anyway. This would render (get it?) it's advantages useless.
3) Chances are my existing PC won't be compatible and I'll end up with a lemon.
4) You're limited to the software the card manufacturers chose to support. There's no guarantee that Premiere 2.0 will be supported for example. This could mean upgrading hardware if you want to upgrade software.
5) As far as I'm aware, there's no HD support.
This definately isn't a piece of hardware that will easilty fit into an existing system. Think hard if you're using this as an "upgrade". That said, and even if it doesn't work on your machine, you'll still get the bundled software cheaper. |