Upgrading a PC to HTPC and picking the right Tuner

[yacpro13]

Hi all,
I was going to build myself a new Quad HTPC, but once I finished adding up the costs, and being a university student, I decided I might take the Plan B route and upgrade my current PC instead.

I built this ages ago when it actually was a decent unit. I'm just wondering what I should be looking to upgrade on it.

I will use the PC like I do now for university stuff, and will have it connected to my Samsung LCD panel. I currently use my xbox360 as extender to watch my movies and music. The main difference will now be that I also want to watch, record and pause live TV.

Here are my Specs:
AMD Athlon 3800+ X2 CPU
2 x 512Mb Kingston HyperX DDR400 (PC3200) Ram
XFX GeForce 7600GS 256MB Video Card
ECS KN1 Lite Mobo
Maxtor DiamondMax10 200Gb HD

Will this system be able to perform for what I want it to do?
What should I upgrade performance-wise?
In your opinion, which would be the best tuner for me (I guess with hardware decoder?)

Also, do you think it is better to connect the PC straight in my TV, or still use the Xbox360 as extender? I'm wondering if one connection or the other would yield a quality difference. Am I wrong in saying that if I still use the Xbox360 as extender, there's no need to worry about my PC's video and audio cards?


Thank you so much!

[Brian2MN]

I would think you'd definitely want to go with a hardware decoder for your video tuner with your processor speed. Aside from that, a RAM upgrade would be a good idea. You'll also need to get a bigger HD, because 200GB won't be very much when you start running your DVR, especially if you record any HD programming.

I believe you're right that the video card and sound card wouldn't be an issue.....but I've never used an Xbox as an extender and am not sure. It would make sense though, because your video tuner would record the audio/video on your PC and you'd use the Xbox to stream the file to your Xbox? I wouldn't think the video/audio cards would play any role in that.