spec me a htpc....

[Georgy291]

im trying to build a htpc, i have a old P4 3ghz cpu and a radeon 9800 pro, tried running 720p and 1080p films on that and it doesnt work so i need something more powerfull i guess. I have a case, a psu, and a HDD and a bit of ddr ram.

So i need advice on what to buy, just one thing for me, it needs to be as cheap as possible and still play 1080p stuff in vlc player. thats all it will be used for

[Georgy291]

so far this is the best i can come up with, but im not 100% sure if it will play HD. can someone help me out here?

[jim]

I would say no, it won't play HD. Atom is fairly pathetic, needs to be paired with decent graphics in order to work properly (think Ion). Even then I personally don't trust it to play all HD content, hence why I didn't go with Atom on my HTPC.

[dangel]

This: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/173797 is what I used for a build i'm doing now. You can offload HD playback onto the onboard ION chipset quite easily.

[Georgy291]

in that case i just found a socket 754 mobo lieing around the house with a sempron 2600 in it, i guess that wont work. But could a fairly cheap cpu be put in to it as a upgrade that will? im thinking sempron 3300 going pretty cheap on ebay, would that work?

[jim]

When I did testing, if we're talking about pure CPU processing power then you need a 2.6GHz dual core - and that's based on a Q9550. Ideally faster than that, or more cores.

Obviously if you can offload to GPU then that changes things slightly.

[scaryjim]

I'd've thought a newer low end AGP graphics card would be the way to go - something like an AGP 3450 should do the trick. That'll offload the HD decoding onto the GPU, leaving your CPU free to keep the rest of the PC running.