hi forum,
am thinking of building a multimedia pc.
my goal is to:

1- be able to stream internet radio over my living room
amplifier, so the pc will need either spdif or digital optical output onboard or soundcard.

2-stream video.

3-capture tv via an ati tv card or hauppage card.

4-rip cd's into mp3 to store on hdd.

5-wireless connection via 802.11g (thru 30ft concrete walls).

I initially thought the system would be based on an asus a7n8x motherboard with spdif with athlon 2500+barton 256mb ram, but I read for streaming video possibly need a more powerful cpu (ie p4).
Is this really necessary. I want the system to be minimal cost.

I have an old dell dimension 4600?? which i think may be OK to use, as it is virtually silent, has a P2 cpu @450mhz, 40gb hdd and i can boost it to 256ram.
would this have enough juice to do the job, after i put a wireless card in.
I was also thinking of using Linux as the OS with Freevo which is linux based TV capture program.
thanks for all replies.
mfm

I'd stick with Win XP for a multimedia server - you'll get more codecs, etc for it.

Also think about RAID 0 for the video capture. I have a multimedia server at home and it has this, which I think you need for capturing big files, etc. The extra HDD speed really helps.