Upgrade the old box to get OTA HD

[chughes]

I just acquired a HD antenna for my house and am going to grab a Hauppauge HVR-950 to watch OTA HD on my office computer which has a monitor that can support the resolution.
In the meantime I was thinking about upgrading my HTPC box for eventual use with the HD signals. As you can see in my signature, I have fairly old equipment, but for my SD cable and TV, it works beautifully. I was thinking that if I upgraded my CPU to a 2.6GHz model (from ebay) and grabbed a new video card like this one, I might be able to pull it off for fairly cheap.
Do you think that would be enough horsepower to transcode the HD signals? I'm not using a server or MVP, and it would still get jammed onto a SD TV until I upgrade that, but that's another story.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by chughes

I just acquired a HD antenna for my house and am going to grab a Hauppauge HVR-950 to watch OTA HD on my office computer which has a monitor that can support the resolution.
In the meantime I was thinking about upgrading my HTPC box for eventual use with the HD signals. As you can see in my signature, I have fairly old equipment, but for my SD cable and TV, it works beautifully. I was thinking that if I upgraded my CPU to a 2.6GHz model (from ebay) and grabbed a new video card like this one, I might be able to pull it off for fairly cheap.
Do you think that would be enough horsepower to transcode the HD signals? I'm not using a server or MVP, and it would still get jammed onto a SD TV until I upgrade that, but that's another story.

As a point of reference, I'm running a P4 2.8ghz HT processor, 1 gig ram, Radeon 9800 Pro, 2 PVR-500's, and an HDHomerun on a box running as a storage/server box feeding a Media MVP in the bedroom.
Works fine for SD over the MVP, but if I'm trying to get HD over the MVP via transcoding in Sage it will only work if it's not in the process of scanning a recording for the commercial skips (I'm using ShowAnalyzer). If it's scanning for commercials and trying to transcode at the same time it's severe stutter time. It will almost do it if I limit ShowAnalyzer to processing one file at a time but even then there is some stuttering.

If it isn't scanning it works fine on HD even if it's recording using all the tuners.

If yours is feeding your tv/monitor directly from your video card and you don't have to transcode the 2.6ghz "may" work.