Hi, ive got the nova-t freeview card which has dual tuners, i was wondering if this processor:
Pentium® Dual-Core Processor E2180 at 2.0GHz, 1MB L2 cache
is fast enough to record 2 channels at once and possibly also watch a divx at the same time?

The machine has 2gb ram btw

Your HDD will probably give you the most issues.

Speculation: you could probably watch divx and encode one channel, maybe if you overclock a bit, say to 266MHz FSB, it might handle two.
Sorry if i'm horribly wrong! You could always try?

Should be fine if OCed a little.

No ocing possible as its a server board

The CPU wi handle it, but I dont think the HDD will like to write 2 files and read 1 file all at the same time.

Wait a second. Are you SURE that the server board supports that CPU? Some times server boards only support XEON CPUs, and the like. Mind providing model,etc?

I use a Pentium D 930 with 2gb ram and it works fine with Vista Ultimate. I also use an old Maxtor 250GB sata hard drive. My video card is a Nvidia 6600 256mb. I have no problems recording 2 channels and watching a recorded show at the same time.

On an older machine just to test I had MCE 2005 runing on a P4 1.8 ghz 400 FSB with 512mb ram and a PATA 80 gb drive and a Nvidia AGP 5200 card (all that is needed is DX9 compatibility). It also had no problems.

None of this is high def. So the bottom line is you don’t need a very powerful system to make a media center out of as long as that is all it does. Mine is an appliance boxes and do nothing but MCE.

Im waiting for 2way cable card to make a HDMCE.

Yep its the "dell SC440" - i was suprised aswell, but apparently it can take most s775 cpus (xeons, c2ds etc)

I realise none of this is HD but it would be nice to know if i did have some hd media source that i could play it np's

I would think that my same Pentium D system would have no problem playing HD content. If anything I might use a different video card but I bet yours is way better than my 6600 in my MCE box already.

Recording regualr TV is about 3GB an hour, HD is around 13GB an hour. Any standard HDD today should be able to do that.

Actually not even that is necessary. There are a few DX7 cards and IGPs that work. It's more of an artificial requirement than anything else, no real reason for the selectivity required, just Microsoft being Microsoft.

Here's my elaboration on the topic: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] mshardware

Google for "Pin mod". Should do the trick.

^True, but depends on what FSB the CPUs running at. FSB 1333/1600 is the max BSEL mod can go. Also you would also may need a Volt mod if doing a BSEL mod.