Turning a dinosaur into a home theater PC

first and foremost, noob alert. . .

I have an old desktop system that I am looking to hook up to a new 42" 1080p LCD to watch netflix, DVDs, etc. here are the specs

Sony PCV-RS610
P4 hyper threading 2.8 1 MB cache
512 DDR @400MHz
GEforce 5200 128mb
160GB

what would be the most cost effective way to upgrade this system so it will smoothly display video at 1080p? gaming is not a concern, I only play occasionally and I can run everything on the old 5200. any help will be much appreciated.
be gentle, its my first time. . .

Dump it, pick up an Ion based Intel atom ITX board.

Low power consumption, and HD playback.

I agree here 100%. A new intel atom dual core 330 system just comes to under 400 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16813500030 This system is about 10x faster than your p4 and with having the nvidia ion graphics system with it, it can do 1080p playback, Ziatc makes great boards and their support is second to none

maybe I should have phrased the question a little differently. . most economical way to get 1080p?? a new system does sound like fun and all, but its not what I was planning on right now, hence trying to wrangle some use out of the dino. .

PS3. Lol. In all honesty your best bet would be to upgrade the ram to 2gb (if you can for less than 150) and upgrade the video to a hd3670 or 3850 but then again both the ram and the video card are gonna be about 300. And your cpu will more than likely limit you to 720p playback without stuttering.

That Atom system I posted for about 350 would outperform the current system even if you upgraded the ram and the graphics just do to the face of the cpu being a lot faster.

I see. so 720p it is!! (stupid question edited out here) until I get my hands on a PS3 that is. thanks again

If you want smooth 1080p playback, all you need is a recent videocard with hardware accelleration. My HTPC is build around a Passive Radeon HD 4350, and hardly touches the CPU at all (which is the cheapest CPU I could get when I bought it, I think)

Speed of the card doesn't really matter, as long as it has the latest generation of Avivo/PureVideo.

So what you need to turn that dinosour into a HTPC is a modern graphics card, which would be less than a hundred bucks, even for an AGP card.

There are two drawbacks however:
- A P4 (any P4) is a power-hungry inefficient monster. HTPC's should be quiet and efficient. P4s are neither.
- As said before, the machine is AGP, which severly limits your choice of graphic cards.

If it was a PCIe board, you'd be done with $30, but now you'll be paying more for something you might want to replace after a few weeks of being annoyed by loud noise during your movies.

well thats even if you can get it to playback. In all honesty i would trash that system

well it does playback netflix movies just fine on the current display (although it is a tiny 15" LCD)
I don't see how the larger display will make a difference to the CPU if it is being displayed at the same resolution. . ?

You are a wasteful child.

If nothing else, that machine would make a great firewall appliance.

Ya, if you have PCI-E you'd be fine. But if it's AGP, by the time you upgrade ram and the video card, you will be very close in price to an Ion/atom based itx board (you can get the board alone (With a built in CPU and the onboard 9400m for graphics), with HDMI out, for about $150ish).

You can get one with a lower power itx psu for like $20-$30 more. Throw in $25 stick of ram and you have a low power and quiet HTPC for under $200 if you keep your same hdd and other peripherals.

so something like this?

# CPU Type: Intel Atom
# FSB: 533/400MHz
# Supported CPU Technologies: Hyper-Threading Technology
# Number of Memory Slots: 2×240pin
# Memory Standard: DDR2 800
# Maximum Memory Supported: 4GB
# SATA: 3 x SATA 3.0Gb/s
# SATA RAID: 0/1/0+1
$115.99 after rebate

tried posting the URL for newegg but I guess I'm too new to be allowed such power.I'm not familiar with putting things together in a tower, will the old HD give me problems hooking it up? I was assuming the multiple memory slots were a better choice and worth a higher price, am I way off on this or should I save 20$ and spend it on better memory?

You need to make sure it's an ion chipset. There are a lot of atom based boards out there, but you need a more powerful chipset to be able to handle the 1080p playback.

Any of these, the N230 is the single core which is fine if its just an HTPC. If you want to use this more of a regular computer as well I'd get the dual core.

so to update the noob chronicles. . .
I found out, to my chagrin, that the display I was looking to hook up the PC to only has a max res of 720p, which considering what I have to work with seems like a good problem to have. I hooked the machine up via HDMI and I get the desktop to display, but the proportions are wrong, the desktop is too large for the LCD if that makes sense. I have tried changing the res with Riva Tuner, but haven't yet had any luck. thoughts?

and as a side note, would I run into the same type of processor roadblock if I was to upgrade my video card to one that would output 720p?

thanks again for all the feedback