Minimum H/W Requirements for HD(firewire)/SD Recording Only

[WellThen]

I am currently using an Compaq Athlon 2200+ (~Pentium 1.7) as a Sage server. I'd like to free it up for other things, and I have a chance to get a 933 mhz Pentium III Dell Optiplex GX150 for cheap. The Dell only has 256MB of RAM, so I'm sure I'd have to replace the memory. It has 2 full-height PCI slots, and one half-height slot, so I'm thinking I could put in a half-height Firewire port and my 2 Hauppauge 150 PVR cards.

Does anyone have experience with recording from 3 tuners (1 being HD via Firewire) on a machine this slow? I know that playback is the real performance hog, and I don't need playback on this machine at all- I just want it to record well, and to stream HD or SD to multiple clients while recording if necessary.

Thanks!

[WellThen]

OK, as an alternate request, could folks post if they have any sub-2Ghz machines doing both of the following:

• HD firewire capture
• SD from a hardware encoding tuner card

Thanks...

[blade]

I don't do HD fireware capture, but I have (2) PVR-500's and have no problems. My server is a Celeron 366 with 320mb of ram.

I think you'd be more likely to run into disk limitations than CPU problems. Make sure the onboard controller can handle large enough hard drives or that you have room for an IDE controller card.