I'm looking at building a MythTV box and was going to look at using some old hardware I had lying around but after having a look at some shops, I can build a brand new system (albeit with cheap parts) for a similar price! I was previously looking at like a P3 866MHz-based system but when I can buy a Celeron D 2.6GHz for $80, big step up and I was buying the P3 anyway.

Would a Celeron have enough throughput for a good quality MythTV? I'll be coupling it with a good and well-supported (HD preferably)TV card.

I've heard good things about the new Pentium D's but how do the Celerons hold up? Any good? Any other hardware suggestions or input would be appreciated as well, never done anything with a special requirement like this before.

Thanks

Intel processors consumes too much power compared to AMD processors. AMD Athlon X2 3800+ is a lot better and consumes a lot less electricity. A very fast processor is needed to decode and play back HD, so the AMD processor that I suggested is much better.

The AMD is also about $300 more.

I was talking to some blokes in #mythtv-users last night and they reckoned that for HDTV, the Celeron would be able to record okay but I had no chance of smooth playback. Are the Celerons really that inferior? I could watch HDTV fine on my old P4 3GHz and I'm looking at a dual-core 2.6GHz Celeron (which I could up to 3GHz for another $15-$20).

If I was to go analogue TV which I know would look fine using the TV as the display but what sort of resolution is that if I want to tape some shows and store them on my computer to watch? I have a couple of TB worth of disk space on my desktop so it would be the "archive" for stuff I wanted to keep long-term. I know HDTV is a good res which is why I wanted to use that but if it's going to kill my CPU then I might need to settle for standard TV

Any opinions?