Recommendations for a new dedicated BTV system

[todda00]

I am looking to build a new BTV dedicated machine. I have a few parts layin around already, and I would like to use them if possible. Here is what I have:

Hauppage PVR-350 (taken from current system)
Geforce2 MX400 64MB AGP
Creative 5.1 Sound Card
200GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
32X CD Burner
10/100 NIC Card

Here is what I will need:

Case - probably buy a black/silver, normal computer case, not a HTPC case because its going behind seats, not visible.

Motherboard

Processor - Probably get an Athlon XP model, not sure what speed, need recommendations.

RAM - dependant on the Mobo, DDR for sure, need to know how much I need.

PVR-250 - for a second tuner card


Basically I need to know if the video card I have will be sufficient/work well. I also need to know how fast my processor should be to get good results even when recording 2 shows. Same with the RAM, need to know what would be good for performance. I am looking to save money, but I do not want to cut performance much by cutting costs.

Any help is appreciated!

Todd

[jziggy618]

I used the MX440 and had great luck with it. In my experiences, I think the TV-out on the GeForce cards is the best for the money. I was using the MX440 card with a P4 2.8GHz CPU and it worked great.

Since you are going to buy new hardware, I would recommend finding a motherboard that supports dual channel DDR for awesome price/performance. I would use a 2.0 GHz CPU or higher with 512MB of RAM this will give a comfort zone if you do any tweaking or add some more software to use on your PVR. Since you are using hardware tv-cards, you should have absolutely no problems.

[todda00]

I don't need Tv-out because I have a projector I will be hooking directly into via VGA.

[todda00]

I am rethinking my strategy. I want to use the Athlon XP 1800+ from my current system for the BTV machine and upgrade my current system with a new Mobo, Processor, and RAM. Here is my question:

Would an Athlon 1800+ processor and 768 DDR 2100 RAM give me good performance for a dual tuner dedicated BTV machine?

[loftygoals]

That should be more that adequate. I would upgrade the video card, though. The DVD acceleration in these cards are really week. I would look in to getting a DX9 card. You don't need anything expensive. A NVidia FX5200 or ATI 9600 should do the trick. I'm running BTV on a FX5200 Ultra with the NVDVD 2.55 decoders. It looks beautiful even in 3D accelerated mode.



-bj