Media center PC?

Motherboard: p5mvp3-at
CPU: AMD-K62 400Mhz
IDE: ATA/33
AGP: Nvidia GeForce MX 4000
RAM: 640MB SDRAM
2xUSB 1.0 onboard

Bought it at a garage sale for $10.  But it had a Voodoo3D AGP card in it, I replaced it with the above card (works).  This is a very strange motherboard.  Takes either AT or ATX power connectors, has ISA, PCI, and AGP slots and according to the manual I can install either a AMD or Intel CPU in it.

Anyway, think I can use it as a media center PC, mostly playing stuff off the network?

yes.

now go and RTFM.

Ok.  I'm reassembling it now.  Here is what I did/am going to do to it:

- Replaced old 300W AT PSU with newer 350W ATX PSU.
- Replaced old 2GB HD with a 6GB and a 1GB HD (1GB is for the swap file).
- Replacing ISA Soundblaster16 with a PCI sound card.
- Installing Win2K.

Bleh, fails.  Stutters when it plays video. 

what type of video? on HDD, DVD, ????

>>5
Off of a Debian samba server.

It might be the nic?  Server has Fast ethernet nics, and this box only has a 10mbit nic.

>>6
10mbit isnt enough. 24mbit minimum required.

What kind of video do you think that old CPU can handle? The AMD K6-2 has miserable floating-point performance to begin with, and it's only 400 MHz.

>>7
I tested it with some pr0ns I've downloaded.  Nowhere near 10mbit I'm sure and it was jerking (no pun intended) with those.

>>8
Well, after I installed dx90c2 it went a lot smoother, but still stuttered.  I was going to try to stream DVDs with it.  I had an old Compaq that had a 533Mhz K6-2 (pretty similar to this system) that handled mpeg2 just fine. 

Maybe I should overclock it.  There's lots of jumpers for those purposes.

I don't know what I'm going to do with it now.

>>9
test it on a 100+mbs network first. if you're playing them direct from the PC then its a vid card issue. if playing via network 10mbit isnt going to cut it.

I had a K6-2/400 with 512 MB RAM and crappy onboard SiS 530 video (running DirectX 7.0a back then) that could not do local MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 without stuttering.  I don't remember if installing a PCI GF2MX400 and upgrading to DX 8.0 or 8.1 helped much, since I didn't use that setup for long.

Unfortunately, upgrading that K6-2 would be expensive.

>>10
Probably neither.  The CPU is most likely the bottleneck.  A K6-2/400 is not exactly comparable to a P2/400 (which I have used for MPEG-2 with an AGP Rage Pro just fine), because of the FP performance somebody else mentioned.