anyone tried one of these

They look fairly neat and small
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/HP-Compaq-D530-P4 ... dZViewItem
and used ones are going on ebay for reasonable cost (£99)

If anyone has one can they comment on the power usage of it and the noise levels

Id also quite fancy trying a keysonic wireless bluetooth keyboard in current or proposed setup - are these hard to set up with mythtv ?

http://www.awd-it.com/scripts/prodView. ... oduct=4220

Hi,

Mine clocks in at P2, 2660 mhz, 384 mem and a 20 gig drive. I don't do much tv on it but it will do sd. It came with an older Nvidia card so the vga out looks nicebut the card isn't beefy enough to play with the big boys, one of those half height cards but I forget the socket and am to lazy to pop the cover. Sorry... Big thing is it will take a standard pci card (2) so I added a bttv card and use it for motion, tunes and just about anything except watch tv. I don't watch much tv anyway.

Built in speak so add a monitor & power and it can play. I don't really notice it running only a couple feet away and if I recall correctly, only cost me ~$75.

Hope that helps.
Mike

I have two. Both are P4 2.8 Ghz 1Gb memory. I can't comment on power usage, but they are quiet. The hard drive is the only noise I can hear and only if I am 2-3 feet away.

I added AGP nVidia cards to each and they will play 1080i video. I haven't tried it, but I am sure you do not need to ad a video card if you just want SD. Note, the video AGP card must be a low profile. You can plug two full size PCI cards also.

Install was very easy.

I have a wireless keyboard/mouse on one, I tink it is a Logictec, but not sure. The receiver plugs into the USB. Works for me.

On one, which is my main frontend (it is also a slave backend) I added a Turtle Beach USB audio to get SPDIF. The other just uses the built in sound. Both were easy to setup.