Newbie here, question about hardware.

[MannyO]

Hello everyone.
Great forums, looks like there is a lot of participation and information here.

I don't have SageTV yet but I want to start playing with it mostly as a hobby right now.
This is what I have:
An old Dell server Pentium 4 1.3 GHz with 256Mb of Ram (I'll probably install a Gig pretty soon).
I want to buy the Hauppauge's new dual-tuner PVR-500 and reading this board, I realized that you need a video card with TV out in order to connect it to the tv. I thought about buying the 350 card because of the video out, but from reading the boards, it looks like it's not a good idea.

I have plenty of PCI slots so maybe I can buy two 150 cards instead of one 500, what do you guys think?

Also, I have no idea what kind of video card would be good for my setup. I'm just looking for a cheap PCI video card with TV-OUT.
This server will be running 2003 server and will be used only for SageTV and fileserver, no games, no nothing....
Also, my TV is just a regular Sony Trinitron that's about 10 years old, so no HDTV or fancy stuff like that.
I have Time Warner cable with a digital cable box. I understand a little about S-video and I think my TV and the cable box have them, but I'm not at home right now to verify this.

So these are my questions:

• One 500 card or two 150's? advantages? disadvantages?
  Cheap video card with TV-out jsut for watching tv, I can RDp or VNC to it - it won't have a monitor.
  Hard drives, I think 2 150Gb IDE will be fine, I know about the 64k blocks, what kind of hard drives do you recommend?

Thanks for the help.

-MannyO

[Toddly]

I am not sure if there would be a great difference in having 2 PVR 150 vs. the PVR 500 but you might consider using an MVP for playback instead of a video card. There is a thread in the hardware forum for this plugin. If you have network wiring to your televison it might be the best thing instead of a PCI card. It works real well on my system and they are dead silent. My system gets along quite well with just 512 MB RAM too. I thought that Seagate drives had the best warranty so that might play into your decison but I have used Western Dig., Maxtor and Seagate and they all worked great.

[markthenewf]

I've only been at this for a couple of months, but here goes nuthin':

Well, considering youv'e got a bunch of open slots, I'd go with two 150's. My reasoning behind that is Redundancy. If one craps out, no problem.

Also, invest in a sensible vid card. That doesn't mean a $500 ATI or whatever, just one that supports DX9 and can assist in processing the video. It'll take a bunch of load off your CPU and improve your image. You don't have to spend much nowadays to get a card with an SVideo out, which is what I'm assuming you'll be using.

You may also wanna think about getting as small a drive as possible for your operating system (40 GB or so) and keep your captures/vids on another drive. The reason behind that is again redundancy and load removal. The capture drive will be doing most of the running and will become fragmented quite quickly. If you keep all that separate from your system drive, it'll be safer.

Just my $0.02.

Oh yea, and your decade-old trinitron will be fine if you'll be using it for DVDs and SDTV. I've got a big-a** HDTV and quite frankly it makes standard def TV look really bad. HD is friggin' great, though . All I gotta do is get my MDP-130 hooked up!

[silkshadow]

That processor might hurt running Sage and Win Server 2003. Server 2003 is quite a CPU hog by itself. If you were just going to use this box to record then it should be fine. However, since you want to use it to watch as well, it *might* not be enough. Thats something you are going to have to try out . PCI video card, huh? Thats not something I am familiar with anymore but, if you can find the FX5200 on PCI, you'll be fine. If you can get the FX5200 then go with the PVR-500. I run 2003 as well and it was a pain getting the drviers going for a PVR-250, a PVR-USB2 and my prolink playtv@7000 card. A single tuner card would save you some headaches. Just a note, that might no longer be true now that SP1 has finally come out for 2003. Its supposed to include a bunch of multimedia updates which might make TV tuner drivers behave better. Hard drives don't really matter too much. Even ATA100 works fine, in my experience, with analog cable. I agree with Mark, seperating the OS from the Sage drvies would be better.