Being used as a remote frontend unit.

Bought it on ebay, these things often go for under $150, sometimes under $100. Mine came with 40gb disk with XP Pro on it, so I changed the disk. Replaced it with a 100gb PATA that cost $5 AR when the stars lined up with the OfficeMax coupons and rebates. Might use the extra space as a picture or music server for the overall system. Added a PNY 5200 card for the S-video output.

Mine came with 512ram on a single stick, pc100. I record strictly digital OTA so I have a lot of HD material and this setup handles it just fine.

On mine the front panel can be rearranged for desktop profile. Doesn't look nearly as nice as my Antec NSK2400, but, its not bad to look at really. Some are desktop only and look a little nicer. Surprisingly quiet as well. Has a built-in speaker which works great for my bedroom setup.

The only reason I have it in tier 2 is because the audio is consistently about 1.2 seconds out of sync with the video. I'm sure there's some simple setting I haven't found that will fix it.

You could try:
Utilities/Setup>Setup>TV Settings>Playback>Use Video as Timebase and Extra Audio Buffering. That cleared up my OTA HD sync problems. Actually I have everything on that page checked.

P4 2.0ghz
FX5200 using tvout
512 Mb ram
300 gig drive

Thanks, I'll try that, but it really seems the big problem was I had just the video passing through a dvd recorder before going to the TV, and the audio was coming from the computer speaker. Its an older tv, no svideo input.

At Walmart today I found a device that will accept s-video or composite and convert to RF out, to channel 3 or 4. That fixed things.