DVD Drives

Hi Guy,

The concern involving a better video card ( I assume Matrox Millenium is a video card) is that DVD take up a lot of memory (Video and RAM). So the point is that if you have a beefed up machine with enough memory in Ram and video, the DVDwill work better.
Toshiba and Phillips have the best handle on the technology right now, in my opinion.

Good hunting!

If you're going to use the DVD drive to view movies, which I assumed, you need a better and faster graphics processor with a lot of memory. That was why your salesrep recommended you to buy the MAtrox Millenium. There are other good ones to choose from to suit your budget. But if you are going to use your DVD drive to read data, as in MSDN subscription from Microsoft, of course you don't need one.

No, you dont need the Matrox. DVD drives will operate fine as high capacity removable storage devices. So for software DVDROMs the drive is all you need. Video is an issue if you intend to watch movies on the 'puter. Then there are many options other than the Matrox. If you play games, you might want to look at other, better, 3D video cards, I'd recommend anything with the Nvidea G-Force chipset. If games don't matter look at any new video card, most that you find will come with a softwareDVD player that works with their card. Or you might want to consider an MPEG decoder card. A decoder will work with the existing card and take over a lot of the processing work. With software DVD you may find the movie is the only thing you can doon the computer everything else will crawl, and the more you try to do while watching your movie the worse the DVD performance will be. A Hardware Decoder may be a better solution. See Sigma Designs "Real Magic Hollywood Pro" I'm using it in one of my old Pentium 166 ma

A Toshiba Bare Bone Drive. Also use an ATI video card, it comes with DVD software on the installtion CD.