MediaMVP or XCard wrt 450 MHZ CPU

[heitjer]

OK – I have done a lot of reading on these posts and on related other forums. I am ready to buy my final piece for my system. I am a little bit hesitant to decide and would like to ask for your comments.

Hardware available:

• 2 older Pentiums (350 and 450 MHZ) currently running as server in my network, Linux & Win2000, 512 MB Ram
  
• 1 Athlon 1700, 384 MB Ram, running PVR stuff right now w/o problems.
  
• Hauppage PVR-250 (excellent piece of equipment by the way)
  
• Lot’s of hard drives in various forms, space and fashion
  
• Wired & Wireless G Network (just ran a Network Cable to the Home
  
• Entertainment Center, speed no issue)
  
• Currently SDTV, not really intended to go to HDTV soon
  

Here is the situation:

I am just looking for a PVR system that records shows and plays them back, serves pictures and MP3’s & net radio to the home stereo amplifiers. Live TV and pausing live TV is not really envisioned yet and I am not really into DVD playing or ripping. I do not want to display the OS on the TV! As far as I understand it I have two options if I want to go for hardware decoding on the “TV out” side (yes there are more but I narrowed it down to these two…):

Option1: MediaMVP
I like this little gadget and understand it’s shortcomings wrt DivX and response time on the remote. But this would be the slickest solution and the quietest one. I just found one in our local Sprint Store for $79. So the price is really comparable to the XCard for $85. This would allow me to run my bulky computers from where they are right now – in the closet. Especially some older SCSII cards are pretty loud and would not be suited for the Option 2.

Option 2: XCard
Just go with the XCard and place a Computer in the Entertainment Center (doors closed means that the noise is not that bad…). Avoid the loud SCSII drives and just go with the silent 160 MB that I have, will probably have a 2nd small hard drive just for the OS.

Finally - here are my questions:
I would really like to use one of the older machines. The PVR250 records with almost no CPU usage. After this very pleasant experience I looked especially into the hardware decoding side. Current thinking is that if I use hardware decoding I can use the older machines. Today I came across one post that disturbed me. It said something about that MediaMVP needs high speed CPU’s to run properly.

1. Do you think I can run MediaMVP with a 450 MHZ machine? Is there someone doing this right now?
   
2. Is it possible to run the XCard with a 450 MHZ machine?
   
3. If I have to fall back to Athlon 1700 – which option would you recommend? (sub – I understand you don’t recommend equipment….)
   

Thanks for all your support.
*heitjer*

[sub]

The one recommendation I do have is, CPU should be PIII 1Ghz or higher. It'll probably still work if the CPU is slower, but the menus will be laggy as hell...