Help With HTCP Parts

[crazyfool]

hey guys,
i'm thinking about builing a htcp mainly for watching and recording freeview to replace my vhs recorder. I already have a nova tv 500 freeview card i can use and the other parts i'm looking at are the Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H motherboard which should hav sufficient graphics proccessing for dvd and tv playback. 2 GB of crucial ballistix memory and the antec minuet 350 case. All of this comes to about 120. The only thing left is a proccessor. I already have a p4 3ghz lying around but i dont know how hot this will run for this setup. I really need to know if this proccessor is sufficient and the type of cooling i could get for it and also is there a better motherboard for a htcp then wot i have chosen... Any recommendations would be appreciated... lookin to spend as little as possible...thanks

[s3ds]

i am still using a 2.8 p4 478 for the same thing ( Nova-T) card 1mb ram

what i did was replace the fan on the cooler with a 120mm and used an 80-120 adapter but s478 fans were noisy

[s_kinton]

I had a VERY similar setup and it worked fine. I used a P4 3.0Ghz s478, Antec Minuet and an ATi 9200SE. This played DVDs, recorded two channels at once etc etc all very smooth. That setup is more than capable for anything (besides HD).

Let me know if you want a cooler for the CPU I've got an 'Arctic Cooling Super Silent 4 Ultra TC' doing nothing in a cupboard. You can have it for the price of postage, its very very quiet. Read here:

Arctic Cooling Super Silent 4 Ultra TC heatsink/fan | silentpcreview.com

[Funkstar]

Dealing with freeview (or any of the DVB video standards) requires very little CPU time. It is already in MPEG-2, so you are just dumping the stream to disk etc. I've heard of someone using an old P133 and a stripped down Linux install managing to record DVB-T streams (record only, it coun't play them back).

And with some hardware accelerated HD you odn't need much processing power for that either. Using a 780G based AMD system, even demanding BluRay titles only use about 20% of a dual core 2.4GHz AMD system. I believe a lot of that is the overhead of processing the DRM and running PowerDVD too.