Is it time to replace old hardware?

[mtncrux]

I have a six year old home theater computer running SageTV 7.

The specs are:
ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard with integrated nVIDIA GeForce 6150 graphics
2GB RAM
AMD ATHLON 64 X2 3600+ processor
Windows XP


I use it as both a server and client on my main TV. I also have one HD-300 in the family room.

Most content is OTA recordings from an HDHR, and ripped DVDs.

Lately this machine seems to be having performance problems. If I am watching a show and it starts recording a HD broadcast, playback gets choppy and pauses.

I am also unable to play ripped or downloaded 1080P movies smoothly. They tend to be choppy with some digital artifacts.

I never have any performance problems with the HD300. It just works.

I can't tell if performance has gotten worse over time, or if I am just watching more HD content that I used to watch. I definitely noticed a drop in performance when I upgraded from SageTV 6 to 7 about a year ago.

My question is: Should I expect this system to work smoothly with 720P, 1080i, and 18080p content, or am I asking too much of this hardware?

How much effort should I put into trying to debug the performance issues versus upgrading the hardware and doing a fresh install?

I have a feeling that doing a fresh windows install on the same hardware might help since things seem to have gotten worse over time.

Would going to Windows 7 on the same hardware make things better or worse?

If I decide to replace the motherboard and CPU, can someone recommend a good budget combo (with optical SPDIF) for this application?

[amac]

I still use XP but I just did a reinstall of Sage only and that helped quite a lot. Sage was crashing on playback very frequently to the point that the whole family was exasperated.

Since the reinstall 2-3 weeks ago, I think I've had 1 crash. I think between the Microsoft service packs and plug-ins, something just gets mangled from time to time.

Your machine specs should still be adequate, save for the Nvida 6150 is quite dated. Up until a few months ago I was running an Athlon X2 5000+ without hiccups. I then upgraded to a Athlon II x4 620e (45-watt processor). Aside from transcoding, I haven't noticed any difference using it with Sage.

Note, I am currently also testing Windows 8 on the same hardware. So far so good using only the stock Windows 8 codecs. There does seem to be a bit of tearing so at some point I'll change the codecs but I dread the nightmare of optimzing codecs.

[Fuzzy]

Two possible ways to go. For starters, I would still expect your hardware to work good enough with 720p and 1080i MPEG-2 material (like your OTA broadcasts). Those don't take much power for decoding. However, H.264 and VC-1 decoding DOES take more power than you've really got available. There are two ways to go to fix this. One would be to go with a new motherboard and cpu with integrated GPU (sandy/ive bridge i3/i5, or amd A-series APU). The other method would be to get a latest generation, lower end discrete graphics card, which can offload the decoding duties from the limited CPU. Personally, I'd go with the new motherboard/cpu, but that's going to cost more.