Upgrade advice, please help.

[McTurok]

I'm currently running Sage on a AMB T-bird 1.4 Ghz w/ 256 MB Ram on an XP Pro PC.

I would really love to add another PVR card (as in the PVR-350), but I'm not sure if my PC can handle it.

So should I got ahead and get the PVR-350?

Or instead upgrade my CPU first.

Is RAM that important when having 2 PVR cards in one pc?

I'm looking for info from those who have done some upgrading to their systems, like I'm planning too.

Thanks

[stanger89]

One of the beauties of the SageTV architecture (using HW encoders) is that recording takes almost no resources. So assuming your system is working well now, adding another tuner should not require any upgrade.

[Opus4]

True -- with both hardware encoding & decoding, about the only thing I might consider is a memeory upgrade, but you may not really need to bother with it. I just always liked more memory, though I no longer know why.

- Andy

[thatdude90210]

I've been running fine on 2 PVR-250's with a 2.0G Celeron and only 256MB for months. If you're going to 2 tuners, might be a good time to add more harddrive space.

[Opus4]

Originally posted by thatdude90210
If you're going to 2 tuners, might be a good time to add more harddrive space.

You are absolutely correct -- wish I had noticed the hard drive listing! That drive space can go very quickly, especially if you ever decide to turn Intelligent Recording on. I always seem to want to be able to store more shows.

Also, I haven't been following the 350 threads in detail, but you might want to double check to see if anyone uses a similar mb & whether the 350 works ok on it. If you are happy with the picture you are getting out of your video card, you may or may not want the hassles of the 350 & simply go for a 2nd 250 or something similar.

- Andy

[kny3twalker]

if you decide to buy more harddrive space watch the adds
I do not know if there is a fry's electronic near you but they had 200 GB for 99 dollars
also I saw that compUSA had a 120 GB for 50
I believe those are the stores anyways, you should be able to check the sundays ads via their website

also ram is not a bad idea but with hardware decoding it should not be necessary

Also your motherboard should be fine since it is a nforce but check to see if anyone else is using it like Opus4 said

also remember if you pvr 250is a newer one without the heatsink make sure to use the newest drivers SHS has posted in the hardware section of the forum and not the ones that come on the CD

[McTurok]

Hey thanks so much guys.

I really want the PVR-250 output to my TV because I really like watching live sporting events (NBA, NFL, etc.) and I just can't get the playback good enough with my FX5200.

Don't get me wrong, it's great for TV shows and movies but for sports, it just sucks. IMHO

My current 160 GB harddrive is doing great. So that's not a need.

RAM has seemed to stop dropping in price for quite some time. I would love to get 2-256 meg chips of PC3200 but I don't really want to fork out over $100 for something I'm not sure I will see a preformance in when using my HTPC.

CPU's are cheap, but I can upgrade that really at anytime.

Thanks again for your advice.