Hardcore Rock Superstar

iTrader: (2)

Hey Ladies n Gents,

Moving into a new apartment where I'll have a single living/games/family room. I'm thinkin about setting up a home theatre PC, though i'm not 100% sure whats needed/required.

Possibly Relevant Equipment:
TV: Sony Rear Projection LCD
Receiver: Yamaha HTR-6060Speakers: Towers, center, bass (no surrounds yet)
Shaw HD PVR (HDMI)
Samsung DVD (HDMI)
Nintendo Wii
Remote: Harmony 880
Dell XPS M1710 notebook (currenlty use s-video and rca's)
Router: DLink DIR-655
NAS: DLink DNS-323


I'd like to put together a PC that uses the tv as the monitor and receiver as the stereo to stream movies/music/whatever from the NAS. I'm not much of a gamer, so i don't really care about that. My gaming is pretty limited, and even the shady video card on my XPS has been good enough for anything i've conquered (solitair, minesweeper on expert, etc etc)

My original thought (and I don't even know if this would work) was to steal a Dell GX270 tower from work (or they get recycled) and add in a PCI Express video card that has HDMI out. Then connect that to my receiver in place of the dvd player, and I'm good to go. Problem is, I don't believe the GX270's have PCI Express video slots, but rather AGP. If I could get a GX280 or something that had PCI, could the process be as simple as this? Could I simply add in a video card with HDMI connections on it and be good to go?

how would the resolution display? The native resolution of my tv is 1366x768 (a little old school). Current S-video from the laptop, doesn't so anything more than I think 800x600, so it's not the greatest hence lookin at a dedicated PC.

The TV, if you're too lazy to look has no DVI/VGA ports on it. Only a single HDMI or RGC/RCA/Coax/optical (i think). Receiver has two inputs, one output. Again no DVI/VGA.


Being that i'm in the middle of moving i'm poor, so I can't go out n drop $500, this was just sorta something that popped into my head through the night and thought might be cool. Thoughts/ideas welcome.

tegtime

dont get to crappy of a computer cause it will struggle with blue rays . maybe even dvds if u have other things running in the back ground. i dont even own a tv anymore i use my computer for all of my entertainment purposes . radio, tv, movies, and games if u want to use ur for games u might as well go buy a new computer cause there so cheep now . for $1000 you can buy a killer machine if u build it urself .