Question about the Via C3 1ghz processor for use in a home theater/emulation pc

[palidor]

In the near future I plan on building a little home theater/emulation pc with one of those flexatx shuttle cases... The VIA C3 1ghz cpu looks attractive because it doesn't require active cooling, is relatively inexpensive, and consumes little power.

I understand that it pales in comparison to similar clock speed cpu's by intel or amd, but that's not my biggest concern. I want to know the following if I were to build a PC using that cpu and rougly 256mb of ram (not sure what speed, havent looked into the motherboards yet & what they can handle):

- Will I be able to smoothly watch DVD's with a software decoding player (PowerDVD)?

- Will I be able to smoothly emulate SNES / Genesis / NES / Game Boy / Game Boy Advance with this CPU?

Does anyone have one of these? Any comments?

Any feedback would be appreciated! Thanks!!!!!!

 

[Zap]

I have used a few C3 systems. PowerDVD works fine on an 866 in a Shuttle SV24. Didn't try any emulators. Various "normal" tasks (browsing, etc.) worked just fine. Quake 3 played beautifully at low settings on an 800 with a Geforce2 (640x480, vertex, low textures, simple items, no sky, etc.). Dungeon Seige was pretty laggy on a 900 with a Geforce2.

[edit] Didn't finish my thoughts... if you're worried about CPU power and not as concerned with "cool processing," then pick up a Tualatin Celeron. It runs reasonably cool and is fairly powerful. A good Tualatin system can do just about anything, and do it much faster than a C3.

FYI I currently own 4 C3 processors and three Tualatin Celerons (as well as a P3 and numerous slower Celerons). VIVA SOCKET 370!

 

[zsouthboy]

Those emulation projects you list should run more than adequately, i do all of those with my 400 celeron laptop, and i know they run on as low as a 200 pentium
Hell, you could probably do some n64 emulation too, if you wanted to.

DVD software decoding should be no sweat also