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I have a celeron 2.4 ghz Shuttle box with a PVR-250, a cheap Nvidia 5200 AGP card 64 megs, and a WD 7200 rpm 8 gig cache HD, built in sound and lan.. running Win2k Pro.. works great..
I actually use the PVR's decoder, which is about 30-50% CPU time when watching video on about a 4 megabit mpeg2. I heard Nvidia decoder is even better, but I have plenty of CPU to spare...
with the PVR doing all of the encodign work, a passive heatsink 5200 vid card, and a relatively cool Celeron, the box stays relatively quiet..
I'd wonder about the built in graphic chipsets that comes with the ultra low end Dells though. Some of their really cheap models don't have an AGP slot either..
I've read that mp3 and mpeg encoding isn't greatly affected by the small caches.....
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