Hey everybody, I've had my previous PC sitting in the closet for a while now. I haven't really had a need for it, but I recently got back from college where I got to experience true broadband for the first time (I currently have the awesomeness that is satellite internet which gives me about an 1/8th of the performance of cable/dsl at about 3x the price). Needless to say I managed to about fill up a 300gb external drive with shows, movies, music etc. and have decided I want to use my old PC as a media center for my HDTV. I'd also like to play some RTS and turn-based games on my HDTV, but nothing really graphically intensive like crysis or something. I have an nVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 w/256MB in my laptop and it runs all the games I play with ease, so I think a 512 would definitely be overkill for the older PC.
All that being said, I've tried the S-Video out that's already on it and in some situations it doesn't work, when it does it's impossible to see what's happening on screen. I did search and the main problem is since it is an AGP slot, most of the recommendations I found were no longer listed on new egg. I'm assuming I would want an AGP card with a DVI out that I would then transfer to HDMI for the TV. So, in summary, my questions are A) If I get a card like this, will the resolution be good enough that I can watch shows, play games, and use my browser, word processor, etc. on my HDTV? and B) What card do I need (Has to be an AGP)?
Just a few other notes... I actually built the PC a few years ago, but for the life of me I can't remember what all I put in it. I'm pretty sure its a P4 and I know it's got 512 mb of ram. I do have an open ram slot if I need to upgrade that also. Oh, and obviously it'd be great if the card was less than $100. The less I have to drop in this older system to make it work the better.
