Building HTPC with old hardware

[timswim78]

So, I've got a few P4 and Athlon XP systems laying around. They have between 512MB and 1GB of RAM, 160-200gb hard drives, DVD-RW drives, integrated audio, and wimpy video cards.

If I upgrade to decent video cards, will these machines function well as HTPC machines? By HTPC, I am thinking about hooking up a HDHOMERUN tuner for OTA stuff, Hulu, Boxxee, or maybe even XBMC.

I've noticed some people building HTPC's with Atom systems with pretty low performance, and having the Ion chipset do the heavy lifting for videos. Is there any AGP video card that will do enough of the graphics processing to make these old machines useful for HTPC stuff?

 

[Chapbass]

Pretty sure the 8500gt can do some HD video decoding work for you, and I believe they have that in AGP.

 

[alyarb]

there are plenty of AGP cards that can accelerate AVC, VC-1 and flash video. just make sure your CPU/RAM is up to other things you will have the machine do. 1GB of memory probably isn't enough, especially if you plan to do recording. what kind of athlon setups are we talking? thoroughbred-b on a DFI KT400A ideally... you can work with that if you've got the RAM.

 

[Fallen Kell]

I do not know of any AGP 8xxx series Nvidia cards. In fact of all AGP video cards, only a few cards come to mind which do full h.264, VC-1, and MPEG2 hardware acceleration. I think the Gigabite GV-R465D2-1GI HD4650 is probably one of the better ones, with it having a HDMI connection. It won't do blu-ray DTS-MA or TrueHD streaming over that HDMI like the newer series cards can do, but none of the newer cards have been released on an AGP interface...

 

[timswim78]

there are plenty of AGP cards that can accelerate AVC, VC-1 and flash video. just make sure your CPU/RAM is up to other things you will have the machine do. 1GB of memory probably isn't enough, especially if you plan to do recording. what kind of athlon setups are we talking? thoroughbred-b on a DFI KT400A ideally... you can work with that if you've got the RAM.

I'm not in front of the machines right now, but I think that one of them may be an XP 1800+ in a KT333 motherboard. (That is definitely the weakest of the four machines).

 

[timswim78]

I do not know of any AGP 8xxx series Nvidia cards. In fact of all AGP video cards, only a few cards come to mind which do full h.264, VC-1, and MPEG2 hardware acceleration. I think the Gigabite GV-R465D2-1GI HD4650 is probably one of the better ones, with it having a HDMI connection. It won't do blu-ray DTS-MA or TrueHD streaming over that HDMI like the newer series cards can do, but none of the newer cards have been released on an AGP interface...

So these systems will essentially never be able to play blu-ray?

 

[Fallen Kell]

If the graphics card does the full H.264 and MPEG2/4 decoding, yes, they could support blu-ray. Do the research on your card choice though. No Nvidia 6 or 7 series card supports H.264, and in the 8 series you have to check exactly which chip you have to know what it does. Wikipedia has a good article about which chip does what on Nvidia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo#Table_of_PureVideo_.28HD.29_GPUs

As for ATI cards, that is a little more tricky as to what supports what. You are pretty safe with a 46xx series board. There are other lower end cards which might work as well, but there is no definitive list (unlike with Nvidia).

The only thing you will not get is bit-streaming of the HD audio feeds. You can only get LPCM (which is what the PS3 fat gives you). It won't make that much of a difference if you don't have speakers and receivers/pre-processors which are sensitive enough anyway (which usually means big $$$).

 

[CubanlB]

I just put together a P4 2.2 with 768mb of ddr, an 80 gb hd, an asus HD3450agp and a multi card reader. put 7 on it. manages through the boxee interface ok, plays 720p content like butter but chugs with two web browsers open. He wasn't super excited but meh, it was free to him.