With my impending purchase of a new flat panel LCD TV for casa de LowTech I have other upgrades to consider as well, namely ye olde HTPC.
Ye olde HTPC was built several years ago in a time when time shifting SD content and playing our Space Balls DVD about once a month for the first couple of months of the beast’s existence was its primary duty. Unfortunately Space Balls mysteriously disappeared one day, I dunno what happened to it but Mrs. LowTech claims that aliens abducted it. Sounds reasonable to me.
But I digress.
Since I am dropping some serious coin on the LCD I was thinking that maybe I could extend the life of Ye olde HTPC another year or so before I rebuild completely and not have to spend a whole boatload more $ for all brand new HTPC components.
The specs of the stuff I intend to keep (maybe):
Mobo, Abit AN7
CPU, Athlon XP 3000+
RAM, 2 X 512mb
Silverstone LC03 HTPC case
OS. Windows XP Pro
As I understand it the mobo and CPU should be serviceable for HD as long as I don’t try to “multi-task”, e.g. recording while viewing BR disk or ripped HD content, etc. I have to upgrade the old ATI 9600 XT GPU with an ATI 2600 Pro as this appears to be the “hottest” AGP video card capable of running HD content without any major issues (not to mention the driver support for XP). Up the RAM to 2GB (it’s cheap, why the heck not?) and add a BR ROM and I’m set as far as a player goes.
In the near term I will stick with the SD capture card (PVR250) until I figure out exactly how I plan to get my HD content.
So what do you think? Can ye olde HTPC make it a little longer with the upgrades?
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