HVR-1600 Dual Tuner

[coderdude]

I'm looking at building an HD dual tuner HTPC. I'm unsure of exactly what hardware (CPU, RAM, Video Card) will be required to support two HVR-1600 tuner cards recording HD content (or recording an HD show while playing an HD show) at the same time.

Hauppague's website says the minimum processor requirements for the HVR-1600 to display HD content is a 2.2GHz p4 or equivalent. http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/produ...a_hvr1600.html

Also, I have an ATI X800 video card that could plug directly into my DLP TV through a VGA connection.

So...

1. What type of processor would I need to handle two HD Tuners?
2. How much RAM would be required?
3. Would the X800 be sufficient for displaying the HD content?
4. Would connecting the X800 to a DLP TV via the VGA connector display the HD content in all it's glory? (If not, what is the recommend method of connecting a PC to an HD TV?)

Thanks for your help!

[MAXIMUS250]

I have that card in a fast system. I can't speak to slower hardware, but it rocks on my system.

CPU: Core2 Duo
RAM: OCZ 2GB DDR2-800 4-4-4-1
Mobo: Asus P5 Deluxe (P965)
Disk: RAID-1: WD 250GB x2 (C
RAID-0: WD 500GB x2 (M: - TV recordings - 1TB)
Vid: evga 7900GS
Case: Antec Sonata II
DVD: HP Litescribe 940i

[MAXIMUS250]

BTW, I don't know much about ATI cards. I use the component video from my nvidia card into my HDTV, but I also have a VGA monitor. I setup cloned dual display. Hi-def recordings play awesome on HDTV.

I would guess if your TV takes VGA, you should have no problems. You should set it up with a 16:9 display config though.

[ZetaVu]

For HD content on your tv, you need either component out, or dvi (dvi to hdmi) but I believe vga will work as well, it works with monitors. The x800 should handle it, I get away with a much smaller card (min HD spec is fs5200 for nvidia's and 9550 from ATI, so any of the xseries should work).

Processor, not so important, the transport stream (HD) doesn't use much cpu and the card hardware encodes the mpeg files from sd input. I had (similar) cards working on my xp2000 cpu, but the more processor the better you are for multi-tuner functions. I run on my X2 3800 and cpu when capturing two HD stream and one sd stream (one hvr1600 and one ati hd wonder) is less than 20%, even when playing back.