Using an old PC as an HTPC/NAS

[therationalpi]

I picked up a computer for light gaming about 6 years ago. It was $600 at the time, and had enough power to run World of Warcraft at high settings at a good framerate. I don't know all the details, but here are the main points:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz
NVidia 9800GT Graphics Card
4 GB of RAM (it's running 32-bit XP, which can't see all of it)
Window XP 32-bit (Service Pack 3)

My goal is to use this PC as a Home Theater PC, hooking it up to 50" 1080p display. I also have a pair of 3 TB SATA drives lying around that I was going to partition and use as backup drives on my network. I'd also like to be able to watch Blu-ray disks.

My question is this, assuming that I'm not doing much gaming, should I be able to watch videos and blu-rays at 1080p with my current set up, while running a fileserver in the background, or should I look into upgrading? If I do upgrade (and I want my new PC to be able to play modern games at 1080p), what price range should I be looking at.

As a side question, the computer is fairly loud for a home theater environment. If I purchased quieter fans, would I be able to use those for a future build project when I phase this system out?

It's been a long time since I've done anything with PCs, so any help would be appreciated!

 

[hang-the-9]

You'd want a boost to memory most likely, aside from that should be OK for movies and file sharing at the same time. I'd setup the OS on one drive and use a second for file storage to help keep disk throughput higher.

Don't see why you could not reuse fans unless you pick a new case that does not accept the size fan you get.

For any decent gaming build you're looking at $600 for a start to play demanding games at high resolution at above low settings. About $200 of that will be for a video card with $110-120 for a lower end gaming CPU.