Best system for the dollar

[lonegeek]

Im curious as to what you all think the best system for gbpvr to run on flawlessy.. And is on a budget.. No crazy 3.8 ghz 64bit intel p4 extreme...

How much ram?

Cheap good hard drive space?

Best tuner??

Best video card?

But all resonably priced!!

THanks zach

[dgeezer]

Mine runs without a hitch on an Emachine Athlon 64 with 512mb ram and a 160 gig harddrive. I bought the basic box with crt monitor and a pos printer at circuit city (USA) for $510.00 (US) after rebates. I added my PVR150 from my old system and eventually added a second 160 gig drive ( $85.00 after rebates).

You really don't need much of a PC to handle standard def TV if you have a hardware encoding card. Even my old Athlon 1200 recorded and handled playback over the MVP, except for AVI's, with no problems.

[folkboat]

Did you change/upgrade the video card on your Emachines box? Or are you using the on-board video?

[capone]

The Emachine systems make great dedicated systems. Simple, but you can still add a vid card, HDs, fans, etc, w/o a problem. You even get someone to bitch to for support (hard to get decent live support at that cost level)

[dgeezer]

I have an Emachines T6212 see specs if interested: http://reviews.cnet.com/eMachines_T6212/...ml?tag=sub

I'm running it pretty much stock. I'm using the onboard video. This seems fine for how I use it, since the output is to my TV thru a Media MVP or my desktop monitor. I have been playing around with a Fusion HDTV card in this same box and I think that I will need to add a video card in order for HD playback to work well. This is my main computer in my home office and I have no problems with running my business apps, internet etc. while my daughter watches recorded shows in the other room.

My old Gateway athlon 1200 system, however, was not able to playback live tv from the PVR150 card without lots of stuttering and dropped frames using the onboard video (Savage S3). I added a fairly cheap ATI 9250 card to that machine and it served very well as a basic PVR machine with output to the MVP or my monitor. I upgraded mostly because the mother board wouldn't recognise anything over a 133GB hard drive and it only had USB 1.0 and couldn't playback AVI files over the MVP.

[daphatty]

The only thing AGP affects is your ability to playback high bandwidth video (read: HD/WMVHD). If you don't plan on using your PVR for that purpose then a dedicated AGP slot isn't necessary.

[capone]

I thoguht it also effected/helped OSD.