GecGen

I don't know the costs your getting this for, but you may want to consider the new Athlon X2, 3800+, or 4200+. Because your only using 2gb of ram, you could easily get away with these chips, unregistered cheap ram, and you'd still have room to upgrade to 4gb if you wanted in the future. I don't know if youd need a high end video card since your probably not watching more than 16 channels at a time? Id Consider Building AMD Athlon 4200+ X2 (2 x 2.2 Ghz which in test are > 2 xeon 3.4 ghz) Asus A8N5X Mother Board 4 SATA Connectors, 2 IDE Connectors 2 GB Corsair 667 DDR Ram 2 Slots Free DVD-R ATI 9250 128 Mb Vcard Many Combinations of Hard Drives, Up to 6. You could use a WD Raptor 10000 rpm SATA, 74gb if you wanted a fast access hard drive, scores very close to scsi drives for less than half the price. and or/ 4 x Hitachi 500GB Hard Drives If you needed more room, you could always use the usb exterior hard drives. $30 per enclosure up to 10 usb drives. This set up should be cheaper, and allow you to spend more money on Hard drives, or Ram, although 2 gb should be more than enough. You could even start with 1tb and add from there.

I have purchased and Kodicom PG 416 card to test. The problem has started that the video recording at 640x480, normal quality at 30fps is taking up 40gb, per camera, per day. I have been told by several people that this card should take 60 gb total a week for 4 cameras. I have noticed that it is recording in avi format, but I cannot find any option to use the mpeg-4 which is advertised on the package, and by the distributor. Is there a way to use the mpeg-4 encoding? I have noticed you can back it up as well in avi format. No compression is available in the DigiNet software that is provided. The package only came with the cd and the card itself. I have read through the manual twice available on the cd. I can't find any mention of encoding options. If anyone could be of any help, it would be greatly appreciated! Thank you, Grant P.S. Im running an Athlon XP 2500+ 40 gb hd, 160 gb hd, 768 mb ram, radeon 9200, windows xp pro. Plenty of processing power, I do not believe it's the computer itslef.