Hum, so I have an old chip...

[{CLR}geneSW]

So, I may be in posession of an old AMD athlon 64 chip (probably a 3000+ or 3200+ based on the year), and mabey a working MoBo for it as well... trying to come up with ideas for it as all i'll need after that is a case and some ram. BTW, WT, shoot me a P.M. so I remember to grab those cd/dvd drives for you. I had completely forgotten to do that. lol.

Anyways, Ideas on what to do with the parts? I'm thinking a home media center box, but i'm not sure if the chip would be strong enough for it. I could always use it as a mass network storage device as well... soo many possibilities!

[Trooper110]

As long as you have a vid card that can push the signal that you need, that shouldn't have any problems being a media center box, unless you're doing a lot of transcoding on the fly. You could create your own flavor of NAS box as you said. Could also build yourself a router using Smoothwall or some other related product. Or make a hosting box.

[WalkinTarget]

WT, shoot me a P.M. so I remember to grab those cd/dvd drives for you

Doh ! Just ordered 3 more via CompGeeks this weekend. I didn't want to bug ya and had forgotten about them myself after a while.

I'd go with the Media rig, or even a WHS (Windows Home Server) setup that would give you a daily backup of all rigs on your network if you have a few PCs with important info. The OS itself is available for a 120 day trial as well.

[juneau]

Is this a 754 or 939 chip? I tried building my media centre around my old s939 chip for 1080p playback and it failed miserably. 720p was ok though. I ended up completely upgrading to a e2180 to get what i wanted.

I'd probably use that chip for a file server of some kind.

[WalkinTarget]

I tried building my media centre around my old s939 chip for 1080p playback and it failed miserably. 720p was ok though

+1 ... I've read the same thing, so it all depends on what your display is capable of. I'm stuck on an older 720p plasma, but I hate to not build an upgrade path on the PC end in case that plasma gets replaced with a 1080p panel.
We set up a 42" Panasonic for my StepMom last night that cost her $800. Our Pana plasma cost $1800 three years ago, so I hinted to the wife that my eyes needed the new panel. She didn't seem too concerned for my vision needs ....

I assumed Gene knew whether he had an s754 or an s939, but neither is a perfect fit for a media center setup. Plenty of possibilities for these parts, but no easy decision for ya as well.

I can't stress how much my WHS has grown into an absolutely essential tool for me, so I'll tell you about a phone call I got from my PC mentor last weekend.
He was upgrading his wife's PC with a larger hard drive, and after getting it all connected, flipped the switch, only to see sparks fly first out of the PSU, then out of the hard drive molex plug.

He replaced the power supply and put another drive in it, then ran the bootable CD that comes with the WHS setup. It connected to the WHS, then gave him a list of saved PC images to select from. He chose his wife's PC and within 22 minutes the PC was right back to where he had left off the day before when it was functional.
It eliminates ANY screwups or act of nature damage that would occur if you were to have any hardware go bad. How valuable is your data to you ? I've decided that I can do those scary things (RAID0 drive arrays) without any penalty to me or my data. In fact, I lost one of the drives from my RAID array already, but once that drive is back from Seagate, within an hour I will have rebuilt my array and not lost a THING.