Having a problem with stuttering playback. Is my HW good enough?

[J_P]

I am going to be using my everyday desktop as a PVR at the same time. Current hardware is:
MSI-K8M800 Mobo
Athlon64 2800+ CPU
ATI Radeon 8500 64MB
768MB PC2700 RAM
On-Board sound
200GB SATA RAID 0 config.
Hauppague PVR-150MCE
SageTV 4.1 w/Firefly remote

Now, the problem is that I can get the PVR going good on the TV using the video out off the video card, but if I start working on the computer, the TV starts stuttering and won't recover unless I go out to the main menu and then go back to watching TV. I have toyed with some of the A/V encoder/decoder settings. It works best with the NVIDIA coder but the problem is still there. Typical processor usage is 60-70% while watching TV. So, I've concluded that I need to either try some more tweaking of some settings I'm not familiar with, buy a better video card, buy more RAM, or all of the above. I'll also be adding a sound card soon. I'm hoping to get some advice as to what my problem may be. Also I'm using the Overlay setting and not the DirectX/VRM9 setting. Thanks for any help/advice.
Justin

[heffe2001]

New video card would definitely help, you're throttling down that PC with a older, low-speed card as it is. Don't know how well it'll run as a regular desktop & PVR machine, as I usually set mine up dedicated to PVR functions. If you're trying to play games & such while using it for TV, that system will most likely not have enough horsepower to get the job done..

[J_P]

Thanks for the reply. Do you think a Radeon x700 128MB card will be able to get the job done and I'd be upping the RAM to 2GB PC3200?
Justin

[domc]

Most stuttering problems can be solved with formatting your hard drive to 64 bit clusters.

[J_P]

The stuttering comes after recently upgrading from 80GB HD to dual 100's in RAID 0. I formatted in 64 bit clusters as advised. I just purchased an ATI x1600 pro 512MB so I'll post up when that gets installed and let you guys know how it goes.
Justin