Re: Suggestions for Video Card (PCIe 1.0?)
Ended up getting this passive low-profile ready 5570:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161342
I bought the low-profile/fanless just in case I wanted to use it in a more HTPC oriented case in the future.
Also got the memory and the new CPU. All hardware plus Win7 installed and working well. The PC went from a complete clunker to a decent machine. It is no Core i3, but it is going to work great serving my garage TV. Without the graphics card, it would make a not-so-bad WHS “Vail” machine.
The CPU upgrade turned out to be quite necessary because not all my HD content is hardware accelerated…. In particular quite a few HD-DVD (and Blu-ray for that matter) is VC-1 encoded, which for whatever reason, is not accelerated by the ATI 5570 card. Playing back VC-1 content runs those cores up to 60-70%, so I think I would have been in big trouble with the original Athlon 64 3200+ chip. The $50 upgrade to get the x2 (and faster at 3.0 GHz) was worth it.