Feasibility Study Want to turn old box into MCE machine

[Midnight]

Work started to clear out a bunch of the old PCs we had sitting idle and I ended up taking one home.

Its a compaq D510 with a 2.4 ghz P4, 760 mb ram, 16mb on board graphics.

Not a screamer by any means! I think its gotta be four to five years old.

My modded xbox one has been used with XBMC and plays all my avis divx etc on the tv but its getting slow and probably close to dying on me.

I would like to take this machine and turn it into an windows media center box. Just trying to figure out if its even worth sinking money into the compaq.

Is this machine even capable of playing all the different media files? In addition to playing media files on a 1080p tv via DVI to HDMI, I would like it to download torrents and stuff.

So far I think I would have to add more ram, HD and video.

I figure $50-$75 for a decent AGP dvi graphics card, $50-$75 to replace the ram to 1-1.5 gb and another $125ish for a big HD.

I have a budget of $300 max.

Please help me!

 

[jkresh]

definitely need more ram, storage and video. If the ram is rambus then forget it, if its ddr then it might be doable. A 2.4ghz p4 wont be able to handle 1080p video (without a card with built in decoding like an 8500/8600/2600 and I don't know if any of those have agp versions) and 720p might even be iffy depending on how it was encoded. For regular tv it should be fine, if you start spending considerably more then $300 then you might as well build from scratch.

 

[ForumMaster]

well you can forget about 1080p. 720p should be doable. if you can find an agp card such as the nvidia 6600 which has onboard acceleration, it should do 720p alright. more ram will help. i think you can make it into an MCE box. just don't expect it to do 1080p at more then 5fps.