HT PC Rebuild - Just not fast Enough!

[Quentin_T]

About a month ago I picked up parts on Newegg and built myself a new system. I also picked up a Home Theater PC Case, and transferred my old system to it.

The Specs;

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe Rev 2
Athlon XP 3000+
1 GB DDR (Forget speed)
WD 160 GB SATA Drive
WD 500 GB SATA Drive
An Old and Very Crappy Sony DVD Burner (reads slower than my new one burns)
ATI Radeon x700 AGP

Now in the next month or so I will be replacing my old Tube TV with an LCD, so I have started a small collection of x264 HD films. Now the wmv's at 8 GB play fine, however, the 8 GB or greater mkv's are choppy and totally unbearable. I have tried software solutions such as the CoreAVC codec, and a tweaking program named XP Smoker (Running XP Media Center SP2 btw).

I am looking at replacing the MB/CPU/RAM/Video card. The case is small and runs a bit hot, so I am not interested in overclocking. I also do not want to spend $1300 on new parts to make myself a clone of my current PC. I need something that is going to be faster, able to handle playing these files and eventually recording HDTV signal.

Any advice on how far up the ladder to go with these parts would be great. I know that my current Machine is light years faster than this one, I just don't know exactly what is in-between enough for this compromise.

Lastly, I would like to spend around 300-400 at the VERY most, my checking account seems to be drying up a little.

Thanks for your time,

Randy

 

[AdmnPower]

well i know one of my relatives records and streams hd tv shows to his hdtv through xbox media center with his pc. It's a pentium 4 (overclocked to 4ghz) with 2 gig of ram, and a radeon x850 Platinum Edition video card. with the ati HDTV wonder card. So that might give you a little sosmething to go on. I'd say go for dual core.