[Chuckboy]

I'm thinking about building an HTPC out of an old PC I inherited from my office, and I'm wondering whether it will work.

It has a PIV 3.0 Ghz processor, with 2GB RAM and SATA drives, which seems OK from what I have read here, as long as I have the right video card.

I've been poking around Newegg and it seems I can find an Nvidia Geforce 210 card for somewhere in the $40 range, which should do nicely, with hardware decoding and VDPAU feature set C.

My question is regarding the motherboard in the PC - it is an Intel D915GEV, which only seems to have PCI/E 1.0. I read in the comments on one of the cards I was looking at that it wasn't backwards compatible with PCI/E 1.0, and others mentioned speed issues with PCI/E 1.0 boards.

Will I be able to pick up a cheap video card and turn this into a decent HTPC for $40, or should I start thinking about plan "B" (buy a Revo 3610.) I sort of like Plan B, actually, but If I can have a working HTPC for $40 rather than $300, I would probably like that better

Thanks to everyone here, reading these forums has been very educational.

[burritoboy9984]

ALL pcie 2.x cards SHOULD be 1.x backwards compatible. So you shouldn't have a problem. The bandwidth difference between 2.x and 1.x won't matter in a htpc application. It barely matters in gaming applications, and only when you get in the high end cards.

-Erik

[Chuckboy]

Excellent! Thank you. Card is ordered. Now while I wait, I guess I need to start thinking about whether to run under Windows or brush up on my mad Linux skillz and try to get XBMC Live running. Those topics seem to be well covered around here.

Thanks again for the advice, these forums are great.