thinking of building a gbpvr "set-top" computer

[king_crimson]

right now i'm using an old gigantic gateway with a 1.8 Ghz P4 and 512 MB, works great but its so ugly sitting next to my TV stand...

so, i was thinking i have a dell optiplex gx150 sitting in my closet which is a pretty small horizontally mounted computer.

one of these:



i'd love to turn that into my set top gbpvr machine, just put it right on top of my stereo. first of all, it's not the quickest machine around - 866 Mhz Pentium 3. Not a bad system for the average users' needs. 512 MB PC133 RAM so it runs win xp very very smoothly.

not sure if that CPU would quite cut it for gbpvr unless i want to wait 40 seconds for it to just show up the tv guide screen.

i was wondering if i would get a replacement, say 1.0 Ghz P3 chip for it... how bad would the performance be? how fast do they make the P3's up to anyway? (then i gotta worry about the mobo being able to handle one that fast, but it would be worth a shot.)

the nice thing about it is a already rigged a netgear pci wifi adapter to it, so no problem with having to run an ethernet cable to it.

i'm being long winded, but basically i was just wondering how bad of performance would i get with gbpvr on that kind of system? good enough to live with?

[stustunz]

the machine is on the limit and wifi can be a bottleneck aswell so the 2 together may cause issues the cpu will probably run at close 100% not good
plus what video card does it have you need something that can handle vmr custom which is basically direct3d

gbpvr.exe was able to use overlay vmr7 vmr9 vmr custom
but the new interface been all flash with nicer menus only uses vmr custom and fse

heres how they work in order of horse power usage
overlay is overlay
vmr uses direct draw
vmr custom uses direct3d
fse uses direct 3d but makes fullscreen take more control than anything else

[king_crimson]

the best 2 spare cards i have around are just a radeon 9200 and an nvidia 5200.

[king_crimson]

oh and the capture board is a hauppauge HVR 1600 which is a decent one and i found it on sale for $59

[stustunz]

depends on how good you want the playback really
how much ram on each card?
i dont think the 9200 has the grunt required it would be ok on the old interface using overlay
find a cheap card ati9550 or above
nvidia i would go below 6800

if saving onto this machine you will need a bit more than 40gig considering you will probably be chewing up close to 2 gig an hour (opps forget this line i read wrong)

why not just put the guts out of the system you have into the box

[king_crimson]

i would do that but being dell it's completely proprietary and the board in the gateway is just too big.

and i do have a 160 GB HD i was going to stick in it.

[stustunz]

ok another reason to hate dell i guess

save yourself a copy of 99.12 before its gone for good
great program for slower machines

[king_crimson]

thanks for the tip!

i actually just googled and found out P3's go up to 1.4 Ghz, so if the motherboard can handle that it may not be so bad.

[stustunz]

more ram always helps slower machines aswell and increase the virtual ram

[nitrogen_widget]

ok another reason to hate dell i guess

save yourself a copy of 99.12 before its gone for good
great program for slower machines

Actually, 1.08 runs just fine on my 1.2 tuatlin p3 with 512mb ram & a radeon 9550 256 mb card.
I'm running PVRX2 even.
Though gbpvr.exe in overlay mode had much lower CPU when it came to mpeg2 recordings.

However, i'm convinced that it has something to do with the new direct3d interface & my chosen decoder & not a CPU issue because i've tried PVRx2 on 3 different machines & have seen 3 different odd-ball issues that wern't related but went away when I switched back to GBPR.exe.