Two questions concerning a htpc

[Tipnmo101]

My roommates and I would like to put together a htpc. I was going to build it from scratch, but i saw a p3 733 socket 370 forsale on the forum. My roommate has a dell precision 420, which came with a slot1 p3 733. Now it has been while, but werent there little cards you could use to convert a socket370 to a slot1? SO down to my questions...

- can you use a slot1 and a socket 370 together in a dual setup?
- Would a dual p3 733 with 256megs of ram be fast enough to run high resoultion video? I had always assumed it probably wouldnt.

 

[xsilver]

if you dont have a dual cpu mobo, then you cant get a dual cpu setup

and is all you're doing in a htpc running high res video? arent you recording it as well?
some apps can understand dual setups and some cant... depends what app you are using
a SINGLE p3-733 with 256ram, should be able to handle recording high res video, however it wont be blazing fast, and encoding via cpu will still be quite slow
eg. latest cpu's can encode faster than real time... on a single p3-733, you'll be looking at around half of real time encoding

I personally would recommend something with at least 512mb -1gb ram (ddr preferably) and as large/fast hard drive you can afford -- its so easy to fill up your hdd with movies/tv programs cause 1hour can equal 2gigs -- and you wont have time to encode it all, even on a fast processor

 

[Tipnmo101]

yea its a dual motherboard... but i just bought ddr ram so it looks like we are going from scratch

And video playback will be its main use... eventually we will upgrade to aiw.. but for the time being it will just be playback

 

[xsilver]

playback should be ok then --
and yes you should be able to match a socket 370 p3 with a slot 1 p3..... the main concern is whether they are the same spec cpu (meaning are both 256k cache, and 133fsb)
you can get socket 370 to slot 1 converters, although they'll have to be second hand and am not sure how easy they are to find in your area

 

[imported_Phil]

You cannot use both sockets at once. They're either/or.