=DdogG=

75 at newegg.

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Nightfire

found one....thanks for all your help guys

CingularDuality

OK, I want to build a PC that has two purposes: I want it to be my kid's first computer, and I want it to be a PVR hooked up to my home theater. As my kid may be playing a game while I want to record something, I suppose I should get one of the better cards?

What else does the PVR need? Is it RAM intensive? CPU intensive? I'm obviously going to throw a couple of large HDDs in there and network it with our other PCs.

'Course, I've been planning this for, what, years now... I still need to get my rifle first, too...

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TacticalGamer TX LAN/BBQ Veteran:

=DdogG=

if there are other things you want to do while recording, 1.5 gigs ram, and at LEAST a 2.8 p4, prefferably an A64 3000+ or better. I wouldn't suggest using one box though. get a 2000+ amd, 256 ram, 200+ gig hard drive, cheap video card (a radeon 9000 or a geforce mx4 4000) this should be less than 300.00 with a decent tv card.

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Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -Albert Einstein
The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity. -Harlan Ellison

If all else fails: "rm -rf /"

K2_the_Turtle

I'd recommend spending your money on a capture card with hardware encoding over upgrading the RAM and CPU of your computer. With hardware encoding, you basically won't be using any RAM or CPU when recording TV. You'll be using it for playback, but even that doesn't take a whole lot of umph.

The Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250's are very nice. They recently released the WinTV PVR 150's so be sure to look into that card as well. I don't have a strong handle on the differences between the two.

We've got 20 PVRs setup at work. They are all Dell Optiplex 270 with Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 cards running Snapstream's Beyond TV software. Very, Very solid system.

CingularDuality

So, if the TV card is doing all of its own work, it'll probably still record fine if my kid's playing a game on the computer?

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TacticalGamer TX LAN/BBQ Veteran:

K2_the_Turtle

That's the idea. I can probably run a test for you if you want.

Meaning I'll bring one of our tuner cards home and try to record while playing CS. Send me a PM if you want me to do this.

CingularDuality

If it's not too much trouble, I'd appreciate that. I'm a few months off from building this new machine, but I'd really like to be able to use it as a combo PVR/Kid's first comp.

I know that some of the cards come with remote controls, does the card that you're speaking of come with one?

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TacticalGamer TX LAN/BBQ Veteran:

asch

It will depend on what game your kid is trying to play. Recording a show will take "some" cpu and memory cycles. It will also be writing to your hard drive. If your kid is playing a pretty intensive game there is a chance that both the game and recording will experience lag. I believe you can set the priority of the recording to help one or the other out.

You should check out the forums at www.snapstream.com because I'm sure there are more ppl there who use BeyondTV more than I do and can tell you if they play games while recording, etc.

I don't do both, but then again, I actually have a DVR so I don't use snapstream as much as I used to.