Does this system have enough "oomph" to serve as an HTPC?

[XMan]

Athlon XP 1600+ on Asus A7V-VM
512MB PC133
Radeon 9800 Pro
Happauge PVR500 MCE

Just curious . . . I may have some free parts coming my way from an upgrade I'm doing . . .

 

[stevty2889]

Should work fine. Just wouldn't want to encode to DVD or something with it, it would be dreadfuly slow for that.

 

[XMan]

When you say encode, how do you mean? Burning to DVD?

 

[stevty2889]

I mean like if you were to say record a tv show, and wanted to convert it to DVD format, , or copy DVD"s in to DivX format, thats something that is very CPU dependant, and would take a long time.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: stevty2889
Should work fine. Just wouldn't want to encode to DVD or something with it, it would be dreadfuly slow for that.

Depends if the Hauppauge cards supports hardware MPEG-2 encoding/decoding. If it does, he's laughing.

 

[XMan]

The PVR500 is a hardware decoder.

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: X-Man
The PVR500 is a hardware decoder.

Its a hardware "encoder" the decoding is done by your video card, which the 9800pro is qualified hardware for MCE 2005. Your CPU is a bit underpowered, MCE requirements call for min 2.0GHz for analog and 3.0GHz for HD playback, however you should be alright since the 9800pro does support hardware decoding support for MPEG-2 which is the subset format for MS DVR-MS file format.

You'll need a DVD decoder, ATI's cyberlink DVD decoder is qualified for MCE 2005 as well.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

My first MCE system was an Athlon 1200, 512Mb, Radeon 9550.

Ran fine, especially if you disable the 3D animations in the menus otherwise the menus feel a bit sluggish.

 

[Goi]

If you aren't doing any ffdshow resize/denoise/etc then you're fine.

 

[XMan]

Originally posted by: rbV5

Originally posted by: X-Man
The PVR500 is a hardware decoder.

Its a hardware "encoder" the decoding is done by your video card, which the 9800pro is qualified hardware for MCE 2005. Your CPU is a bit underpowered, MCE requirements call for min 2.0GHz for analog and 3.0GHz for HD playback, however you should be alright since the 9800pro does support hardware decoding support for MPEG-2 which is the subset format for MS DVR-MS file format.

You'll need a DVD decoder, ATI's cyberlink DVD decoder is qualified for MCE 2005 as well.

Can always upgrade the CPU, I suppose. I don't know that the Asus board supports newer chips or OC'ing though . . . hmm.

 

[Xonoahbin]

Yeah, if you upgrade that CPU, you should send the old one to me

 

[rbV5]

Can always upgrade the CPU, I suppose. I don't know that the Asus board supports newer chips or OC'ing though . . . hmm

I would give it a go first with what you have, but if its sluggish and whatnot, you'll know why. Recording itself will be fine, especially scheduled background recording, you'll hardly notice except for the icon in the taskbar. Playback "should" be fine also, but I haven't run MCE 2005 on anything less than my 1.8 GHz AMD64 to say for sure.