I have the VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 4600ti. It's an AGP 2x/4x card. Rmember to check your motherboard's AGP specs before looking into any of the cards mentioned in this thread.

I'm not sure that all makes of the GeForce4 line have the VIVO (s-video in/out) connector. It's important to note that I have the "TI" line of the GeForce4 card. This is distinctly different from the "MX" line of the card, in fact, the two shouldn't even be compared to each other. The "MX" line is the lower-end line and sells for much less that the "TI" line.

The "TI" line has 3 flavors: 4200, 4400, and 4600. Each card has successively more memory speed, bandwidth and performance than the previous. The 4200 is 64MB, the 4400 comes in 64MB and 128MB versions and the 4600 is 128MB DDR. Clockspeeds of the cards is different as is data throughput, although some people have reported overclocking successes. I would not recommend overclocking the card because of the heat problems described in my last post. The highest successful overclocking I've seen gave about 4% performance gain, not enough to risk the card over.

Pure numbers indicate about a 10% difference between each of the cards. In reality, they all perform about the same at 640x480 but performance diverges almost logrythmically as you increase resolutions.

As I said, I've done analog capture and was quite pleased with the results. I even had to run through an RCA to S-Video adapter to get to the card from the camera and the capturing was fine. I had some trouble with a very old VCR I was using at one point, but I think it was the RCA to S-video adapter I was using that caused the trouble (crap Radio Shack adapter). If you have S-video out on your camera you should be in very good shape. The audio capture was good as well, although I'm not sure why you'd want to hook up other audio sources while capturing (see below).

The Xstasy came with PowerDirector. It's a simple, usefull digital editing suite. Let's you capture from a number of sources (directly to AVI or MPEG), edit and output to wherever you want. You can output to files (a variety of formats including MPEG1/2, Window's Media, although no codecs for Real Player), CD, DVD, or back out the VIVO connector to a VCR or CamCorder (although I personally haven't done the S-video out) to make a tape of the edited source. It has a large number of effects, transitions, etc. All the usual stuff you expect from an editor.

I'm a big-time gamer, so I bought the hotrod. I'm lucky in that I was able to justify the card and vidcam as a work expense, otherwise, I probably would have waited a bit until the price dropped. But the cost is something you'll have to evaluate personally. Keep in mind that there is a big difference in price between the 4200 and 4600. Maybe the 4400 128MB version would fit your needs?

The anti-aliasing is awesome. I can run 4x4 and 4x5 (in D3D) with almost no performance degradation. I play a ton of GTA3 at 1024x768 with 4x AA turned on and I get awesome smooth games. Basically, this is a card that doesn't get taxed by today's games, and will be very usable for games in the future. I'm guessing a technology window of at LEAST 1.5 years for top-end games with near top-end performance.

As for the PCI card talk. I use a dual-monitor setup for work. In the past, I've used two video cards to accomplish this, a high-end 2d/3d AGP card on the primary monitor and a cheap-ass-found-on-the-floor-of-the-closet S3 Virge (or similar) in the first PCI slot. Windows needs the second video card in the first PCI slot (enumeration 0), which is the slot closest to the AGP slot. This configuration leaves very little space between cards, which can help cause overheating problems. If you have the room, you can simply leave the first PCI slot open to facilitate cooling of the AGP card.

I don't want to emphasize the heating problems too much. As I said in my previous post, I have a lot of hot "stuff" in my system as well as higher than average ambient operating temperatures. I don't know if you'd have any problems, and even if you did, there are solutions. I just bought a DVI-I to DB15 (VGA) adapter to run my second analog flat-panel monitor, so now I can get rid of the PCI video card altogether. I'll let you know if I still have heat problems once it arrives.

DISCLAIMER: Specs on manufactured cards change as new cards get released, so verify all of this when you go off to look at them.

Hope this helps rather than confuses. You can contact me directly at ICQ# 1228415.