2. Hardware Considerations

Before selecting a front-end media center program, it's important to find out if the HTPC system components you plan to use are compatible with it. SageTV's minimum system requirements vary, but in some situations they are surprisingly low for a media center program:

The RAM requirement is easy to meet at a minimum of 128 MB (SageTV recommends doubling memory to 256 MB) The CPU speed requirement depends largely on the type of TV tuner that is used. Hardware-based tuners are usually more expensive, but are able to capture TV without using up CPU cycles. In a system using a hardware-based capture cards, SageTV requires only a PIII or equivalent processor running at 600MHz.
Software-based tuners are a cheaper solution, but they offload part of the TV capture process to the computer's CPU and require a more robust 1.5 GHz processor. For high definition capture, SageTV recommends at least a 3 GHz processor. SageTV supports a wide variety of hardware and HD tuners but only offers documented support for a couple of software-based tuners. They state that most software-based tuners should work, but have not been tested. (click here for a complete list of compatible TV tuners ) The graphics card requirement is almost not worth mentioning since most video cards will work fine with SageTV. It requires a PCI or AGP-based graphics card with overlay capabilities. (Overlay improves the speed of the transfer between an incoming source and the GPU.) Most current graphics cards are equipped with overlay.

The system that I tested SageTV on is shown in the table below and easily exceeds all of Sage's requirements.

Test System
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 3700+
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9
Memory	2x 512 MB Corsair PC3200 (1024 MB)
HDD	Western Digital WD1600 160 GB
Standard Definition Tuner	Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 500 PCI (dual tuner)
High Definition Tuner	ATI HDTV Wonder
Graphics Card	ASUS Extreme Radeon X550GE
Sound	Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS
DVD burner	NEC 16X DVDRW