FX-5500 + 2nd tuner + new soundcard= New life to old HTPC

[davefred99]

Well I have been busy the last couple of weeks upgrading some components in my old system. The first thing I did was add a little memory, up form 256k to 512k. The added memory made my system much more responsive and seemed to make things just work more smoothly. Now my system is no power house but seemed to do a pretty decent job so I decided to see just how much some other things would improve things so I ordered a new FX-5500 videocard feeling that it would be just a little better than the FX-5200. I got the Chaintech FX-5500 with 128 bit 256k memory for $82.00 form Newegg. While I was at it I also orderd a second tuner card ( pvr-150mce ) for $70.50 and just for kicks I got a Chaintech AV710 sound card to so I could get bit perfect CD & MP3 sounds from its Via Envy24hts chipset uing ASIO ( thats a whole nother topic). All told I spent about $250.00 for everything.
The first thing I wanted to do was make sure the Pvr-150mce was going to work with my existing Pvr-250. I had already update the PVR-250 drivers , SO I just installed the Pvr-150mce and its latest drivers and it worked just fine. I know that some posters here are having studdering issues with these cards but so far mine is working just fine and I can not tell the difference in the recordings or playback from either card. Now to the Fx-5500 video card. I was using an older GF3-Ti200 that was working ok in overlay mode but could not do anything in 3d mode. The main reason I wanted to upgrade was to hopefuly reduce my CPu utilization (cycles). With my old system when Playing back live or recorded programs I would see an average of about 60% Cpu cycles. and if I was recording and watching something it would reach 80% at times. Well my dreams have been answered. Now Using the NVD 2.55 codec with hardware exceleration turned on my playback Cpu cycles average about 35% and recording and playing at the same time average about 45% so on that front all is good. I also can say that while my picture quality with the old card was not bad the FX-5500 is noticably better especialy in 3d mode and the new card using TV-Tool has a much better overscan feature. I am still tweaking a little here and there and switching back and forth between overlay and 3D modes, I think that the picture is just slightly better in 3D mode but the system is just a little undepowered and its not as responsive so I will probably use overlay. JUst for the record I am outputing via the Svideo to an STD TV no Hi-Def stuff.
So for now I have add a little new life to an older Htpc that should get me by until I build a newer one with more horsepwer. It just goes to show that given the right combination of parts even a modest PC can work pretty well as an HTPC.

[SyrA]

Nice work, thats what its all about, make use of all your old stuff and get a good function !