Will this hardware setup run okay?

[Scalpel]

I'm putting together my first PVR tonight, using GB-PVR (of course). Most of my parts are spares left over from other projects or upgrades, and I'm a little concerned that it may not have the performance needed to run well.

AMD 1 GHz Duron
256 MB DDR-RAM
250 GB hard drive
Hauppauge 150
SoundBlaster Live soundcard
Windows 2000

Will this be a servicable machine? I'd rather not upgrade the processor, since it would mean buying a motherboard and new RAM as well. I'm not looking for instantaneous response times, I just want to ensure that my PVR will work okay.

[sub]

It'll work, but performance will be a bit marginal.

I usually recommend a 1GHz PIII class CPU or higher, and 512MB ram or higher. The Duron CPUs were are bit slower than same speed PIII CPUs.

[Scalpel]

Thanks for the fast reply!

This is just a starting system to replace our ailing Tivo. My wife and I will be upgrading our main rigs next year, and I'm sure we'll use those spare parts to scale this box up to a higher level.

[Scalpel]

By the way, would a second hard drive help? I've got an old 40 GB drive that I could use for the C: drive, leaving the 250 GB for all the media. I've heard that doing so will prevent a lot of the drive fragmentation that occurs with PVRs.

My master plan is to set up a scheduled defrag of both drives, preferably in some dead zone of the mid-day when we're both at work and there's nothing on. I'll probably also use a drive imaging program to ghost the C: drive from time to time, to guard against any catastrophic crashes.

On a side note, we're really excited about GB-PVR! It looks like it will do ten times as much as our old Tivo, and will free us from the stupid restrictions and monthly fees that came with the marginally higher convenience. I'm kicking myself for not doing this months ago.

[kaffeen]

I put my PVR system together with spare parts too. I'm running GBPVR extremely well with a Celeron 733 and 512 RAM. With a PVR-150 handling the encoding on the hardware, finding the perfect codecs (I recommend Cyberlink), and a Realtek 7K handling some decoding on the output I am able to record and watch video simultaneously without any problems. I don't use this computer for anything other than PVR, so I've stripped it of any processes that would eat away at the CPU and RAM. It can also help to run GBPVR with a high priority processing option (although I don't do this personally).

Mileage may vary, but I have had very good performance and DVD quality recordings.

[gEd]

it would be a good idea to use the extra (40GB) hard drive as the primary and the 250GB on the secondary IDE channel for the recordings.

I think 256MB of ram is a bit too low (It definately is for windows xp). You may be ok if you can disable enough windows services but another 256MB would certainly help your cpu.