My sister is moving up to a MacBook from the old Dell she's using for her Office 2003 class, which means I have a spare computer I'm thinking about turning into a front end. It's a Dell Optiplex 110, so it's a very small form factor.
Spec are:
1GHz PIII processor
512MB RAM
20 GB HD

I'd toss in an Nvidia MX 4000 PCI card, and replace the noisy hard drive with a silent 250GB Seagate drive. Will this work as a front end? If I was to get a PVR-150 could it be a backend too? IIRC the video card has an onboard MPEG-2 decoder so I wouldn't have to worry about the processor being used for that, and I don't have digital cable or a flat screen TV yet so no need for HDTV at this point. Thoughts?

I've used a 733mhz GX110 and they are fine. Sound card works out of the box. May run into some trouble with setup wanting to use onboard video rather than your nvidia card. See this post on a very similar setup.

http://www.mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13341

I've made a couple of successfull Mythboxes out of 1 ghz IBM Netvistas with PIII's and 512k of memory. (Hauppaugue 250 & 350 video cards and MX400 nvidia cards..)

The 20 gb drive is kinda small for storing programs, would be limited to about 7. My boxes lived out of 250 gb drives.

I've used both a P3-550 and an Athlon 700 with a PVR-350. As long as you have hardware encoding & decoding, you can go with a pretty small processor.

Your will want more hard drive space, though.

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Athlon 700 + PVR-350. KnoppMyth R5A16. ReiserFS on an LVM volume for myth data. Thanks to SnapperDragon, everything seems quite happy.

Thanks for the replies. Like I mentioned before, the stock hard drive is noisy and small, so it would get replaced right away. What video card would you recommend? It has to be PCI, have s-video, and be cheap. I figured the mx 4000 would work, but are there other options?

I've used a MX4000 and FX5200 both a great for SD. You need to output to a TV? If not may be a little cheaper to since wouldn't need the svideo output.

Get a passively cooled card otherwise GPU fan can be noisy. Your probably look at $50 at least. PCI are getting harder to find.