[Piston Broke]

Hi all
I am in the process of building a second xbmc pc. The first machine was built using all ebay parts and is running very well with windows 7 and xbmc.

This second machine is my original desktop from a few years ago and has a 1.8 Ghz P4 with 1.5 gig of ram. I am looking for some advice for Video card. The case that I have is a SFF so I need the card to be half height and AGP or PCI and with either dvi or hdmi out. the PC will be feeding a tv to start with then hopefully via a AV reciever when funds permit. This will be running either Windows 7 or xbmc live but as I have never played with linux / live I can see this being a steep learning curve

First question will this Processor/ Memory be man enough to handle xbmc running 720p movies

Which half hieght video card would you recommend and if I offload video to the GPU would this handle 1080p files

I'm in the UK so any links to UK sites Please

I have googled SFF AGP cards but most seem to be out of stock or discontinued

[CrazyIvan]

Hi all
I am in the process of building a second xbmc pc. The first machine was built using all ebay parts and is running very well with windows 7 and xbmc.

This second machine is my original desktop from a few years ago and has a 1.8 Ghz P4 with 1.5 gig of ram. I am looking for some advice for Video card. The case that I have is a SFF so I need the card to be half height and AGP or PCI and with either dvi or hdmi out. the PC will be feeding a tv to start with then hopefully via a AV reciever when funds permit. This will be running either Windows 7 or xbmc live but as I have never played with linux / live I can see this being a steep learning curve

First question will this Processor/ Memory be man enough to handle xbmc running 720p movies

Which half hieght video card would you recommend and if I offload video to the GPU would this handle 1080p files

I'm in the UK so any links to UK sites Please

I have googled SFF AGP cards but most seem to be out of stock or discontinued

I run a P4 2.8C system with an AGP Radeon (4650?) using Win7. I find that for best results I have to run MPC-HC as an external player. 720P can be glitchy with the Dharma built in player. I'm upgrading this 5Yr old system this holiday season. Its getting a full state funeral due to it's dedicated service over the years.

[darkscout]

These are your only options for PCI/AGP if you want hardware acceleration.

[poofyhairguy]

These are your only options for PCI/AGP if you want hardware acceleration.

And of those I would only mess with 512mb models.

[Piston Broke]

Thanks for the replies guys but looking at the price of those cards in the UK I can get a revo or simlar for £100 quid more and I think that would be a better bet than reusing my old pc will have a look on ebay otherwise it's wait for for some funds and get a revo

[poofyhairguy]

I agree with that. The energy usage difference between an old P4 and an ION system makes a large long run financial difference....