Will my hardware be sufficient?

I'm sorry if this has already been asked a billion times. I searched, but either I don't know what to search or no one is using a set up like mine.

My roommate just built himself a new gaming rig and he turned his old one over to me to do whatever I want with it. We need a media center in our living room.

It is an Athlon 64 single core at either 2 or 2.2 ghz. It also has 2 gigs of ram. GeForce 7600gt card. I'm not sure about anything else but I will figure it out when we boot it up again.

I guess I am fairly sure it wont have a problem with standard definition, but I am doubting the processor is going to be capable of playing HD decently. If anyone wants to tell me I'm wrong that would be great.

My main question is what will my limitations be? We don't plan on doing anything but music and movies so I was thinking a live installation would boot quicker and be more efficient, correct?

Is there any support for keyboards in XBMC? It would be nice for searching for music libraries and such.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks for your patience,

Derek

Hardware questions: No, I don't believe your hardware will be sufficient to handle high definition files. It should handle standard definition files with no problem.

The 7600 card won't offer much help with the video processing. The newer XBMC Linux versions use VDPAU to offload the video processing to the GPU, but your card is not compatible. Look here for some more information on VDPAU.

So without a compatible card, all of the video processing is left to the CPU, and it needs to be a fairly modern dual core to be able to handle it.

Personally, I like the Live installation, so it couldn't hurt to try it out on your system.

Keyboards work fine with XBMC, look here for the keymapping.

Just but a £30 G210 nVidia card - then your machine will do HD no problem

So if I have A VDPAU enabled card(8 series or newer) I should be good to go. I'm not really worried about HD right now anyway. I'm anxious to see how long it takes to boot. Maybe I will get it set up this weekend.

Dero Wrote:So if I have A VDPAU enabled card(8 series or newer) I should be good to go. I'm not really worried about HD right now anyway. I'm anxious to see how long it takes to boot. Maybe I will get it set up this weekend.

Sure, or the 210 that Geeba recommended is a much cheaper alternative that's probably also quieter and less power intensive.

XBMC Live boots in about 30 seconds on my setup, plus it has suspend/resume that cuts it down to more like 5-10 seconds.