Complete noob with low end system

[comptechltd]

Okay as I still am a little confused by this I am going to ask a very stupid question here. I have seen several posts about low end hardware but they seem to diverge off pretty quick.

Can I take a PII 450 or a AMD K62 450 ish computer (which I have a few laying around), install a "good" (Nvidia or ATI) graphics card, put a real Magic netstream 2000 MPEG decoder and a PVR 250 and have it work well with sage tv using it as a PVR and a DVD player???

If so I can do this fairly inexpensively. If it will just work somewhat I don't want to mess with it.

Any recomendations on a video card???

:confused:
Steve

[olyar15]

P2 450 may just work for DVD/Mpeg2 playback, but it might be running out of steam. Definitely get a video card with hardware motion compensation. I use and recommend the ATI Radeon 9000, since you can get these fanless, and ATI has good HWMC and good video quality. Have no experience with hardware mpeg decoders, not even sure if these will work with SageTV.

Make sure you strip the operating system of all possible fluff.

If you already have the CPU/mobo, then you have nothing to lose by trying it. If it doesn't work well, you can easily upgrade the mobo/CPU and reuse the other components. You can probably get a used P3 1GHz/i815 combo for very cheap these days.

[Xleon]

I can _just_ get away with a PIII 450 with a fairly good MPEG card, but I can still see issues with the decoded output. Hence why I'm waiting for the XCard volume support to be implemented and I can use my XCard which absolutely rocks !