[cocopuff2u]

Im looking to upgrade some parts in my HTPC, she does seem to be a little laggy every once in a while. im running xbmc thur windows with filezilla running in the background and eventghost. The 80gb hard drive is for the OS and the 500gb and 250gb are for Movies and TV Shows.

Which Video card should i get that is pci-express 2.0?

Would a GTX 550 ti work good?

Would it be worth upgrading to i7-2600k CPU?


My Specs below:

CPU: Intel Celeron G540 Sandy Bridge Dual Core 2.5Ghz 2MB Cache

Motherboard: ZOTAC H67ITX-C-E

Memory: 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws 1066 DDR3 Cas7

Optical Drive: LITE-ON Black 12X BD-ROM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM SATA Internal Internal 12X Blu-ray Combo

Hard Drive: 80GB Corsair Force F80 500gb Western digital Hard drive 250gb Seagate hard drive

Power Supply: 500w Dynex PSU

Case: Cooler Master Elite 120

[teeedubb]

Get a low end nvidia card and use openelec instead of windows and that will fly.. that CPU probably has enough grunt to decode 1080p via software so the nvisia card may not be even necessary.

[cocopuff2u]

Well i ended up getting that video card for little to nothing, pretty much like 10 bucks.

So what are some good settings i should setup for the GTX 550 Ti?

With the setup i had before i upgraded the video card, there was a slight lag/stutter with some of the videos and some audio syncing issues with some videos. I was never really able to determine what is causing it, soem 1080p videos would do it but others wouldnt. I assume with a separate GPU it should run smoother than the intel HD 2000 . The intel HD 2000 and the GTX 550 ti have a huge difference is output quality and i assume i should be running alot smoother now.

Does the CPU at all effect my video and audio output now that i have a separate Video Card?

In the video card world what is the difference between gaming video cards and low end for htpc?
Alot of people say get a low end video card but in the gaming world a low end video card is like a gtx 550 ti?

Well i attempted to use xbmcbuntu and it gave me so many issues with setting it up and getting it function correctly for me. I hear that openelec is alot easier to setup and use. Sense this is the only thing that this computer does,
is setting it up really that easy? and could i still use a FTPclient to get videos to and from my htpc?

[cocopuff2u]

bump (hope im not bumping to soon)

[teeedubb]

The video card should be doing all the decoding so CPU doesn't really matter.

Outside of the gaming world a low end card would be a gt610 for example.

Install openelec to a USB thumb drive to test it out. Its easy to setup and yes you can use it as a ftp server.

[bluray]

Are you trying to setup HD2000 or GTX550 on Windows? I'm not sure how you connected your HTPC. If it is Windows, here are some tips- Simplify XBMC configurations......