Your mother was a hamster... (1 Viewer)

[CrokersLoveTent]

...and your father smells of elderberries! Now I have your attention. Fellow cyber-geeks, techno-nerds and keyboard professors, I need your help. During times of austerity I lay thee down a challenge to help me complete a stupendously cheap HTPC. I purchased an Optiplex GX620 for £66. This is the Pentium D Dual-Core beauty, with built in DVD, 80gb HD, BTX Motherboard and that glorious Dell monotone glow. I have added 2gb 533Mhz DDR2 Ram (it'll go to 4!) and a 500gb harddrive from a broken cased external that I had lying aroung. Thus far I have spent £86 building this methuselah of a system, however I now want to take the next stage and turn it into THE GREATEST EVER HOME THEATRE PERSONAL COMPUTER BUILT FOR £150 OR LESS!! Therefore I, sorry we, have £64 left to create some history and I need your suggestions to make my dreams become reality. I am assuming I need a Tuner (I would like to use the spare satellite/digital connections I have) and I would assume I would need to add some form of GPU for 1080p or such like. What do I purchase to make this happen? I noticed a pretty little twin tuner on ebuyer for £20, the wonderfully named Compro VideoMate S350 DVB-S Tuner PCI Card. But alas, what say ye on GPU? Is the tuner any good? What am I gorgetting? Is it possible? Am I mad? Do I have cereal or toast for breakfast?

 

[Sam Posten]

Hi and welcome to HTF Joshua. You're question is a bit specific, and your use of crazy money isn't going to help =) Perhaps there will be a few replies here, but I'm afraid I don't have any answers for you. Also, the odd thread title is probably going to cause a few folks who might actually have info on your topic to skip over it. Sad but true, but being direct with what you want will probably give you better results. Sam

 

[mattCR]

Your single core P4 3.4G is going to struggle.. bad.. to maintain picture quality and performance. I'm trying to think if the 620 even has a PCIE slot for you to add a card; I was thinking it did not.


Capture card should be fine. But 1080P on it? Doubtful.

 

[CrokersLoveTent]

Aha mattCR It's actually a Dual Core 2.4 cpu. And inital tests seems to work ok-ish before adding a GPU. I've plumped for a Sapphire HD 5450 1gb DDR PCI-E grahics card. It should stand up to the rigours of HD now. It has the relevant expansion ports (2 pci, one pci-e) for me to add some extras. Sam, I appreciate your feedback. The title might be a little obscure but it made you and mattCR read it ;-) Crazy money!?! That's the idea. Nothing is a challenge if it is not difficult. Just trying to engage those with a greater knowledge of components than myself

 

[Sam Posten]

I meant the use of £ vice $ =) There are tons of international HTFers of course but the majority of regular posters seem to be US centric.