HTPC Upgrades For A 42" Plasma

[Karl The Gimp]

Just got a Panasonic TH 42PZ80B Plasma and i've hooked it up to my HTPC, Gonna get this from scan LG GGC-H20L for Blu-ray, but I dont think the onboard graphics will cut the mustard, so i was thinking of getting a 256MB Asus HD 3450 aswell. Oh and a bog standard HDMI cable.
Al lto go with this lot..

Antec Fusion V2 MATX MediaCenter Case with 430W PSU
ASUS M2A-VM
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+
Corsair Value 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 667MHz
Samsung SpinPoint HD501LJ 500GB SATAII


Any ideas?

[SiM]

Yup, you will benefit from hardware decoding. The HD 3450 is probably the best card for dedicated HTPCs at the moment

[Skinleech]

I've just built a NAS pc for extra storage, and have hooked it up to my 24" 1920x1200 Hyundai monitor - I use it as a TV in my bedroom.

The NAS pc is a single core Athlon 3000, 1gb ddr400 ram, and a 512mb AGP 2600xt. Providing you use the right combination of filters & renderers (i.e. they both support dxva) it'll handle HD-DVD/BD just fine. I've been playing titles at 30% CPU usage. Bear in mind these have been ripped to disk first, as I don't have a BD/HD-DVD drive in there yet.

On VC-1 encoded titles the system is better at playing back that my dedicated HTPC (dual core x2 4400, 2gb ddr400 ram, 256mb 8600GTS).

So basically, yeah, good upgrades, but you won't need to go as high specced as that if you don't want to.

[Bugbait]

Yup, you will benefit from hardware decoding. The HD 3450 is probably the best card for dedicated HTPCs at the moment

I second that, very happy with mine (although haven't tried HD/BR yet). Driving a 46" Sharp HD TV via HDMI.