Blu-ray for my HTPC

[brianstokes21]

I went mother's day shopping for my wife today and I thought about getting a blu-ray drive for my home theater pc as opposed to buying a blu-ray player. I know that I would have to upgrade the some of my system components if I wanted to go that route but what exactly? The store's computer guru told me that I would need to buy an 8800gtx video card and at least a 500 watt power supply. I was thinking that would be a bit of overkill. Well I wound up just buying my wife a nice watch. However, I still want to upgrade. This system is just for watching videos and as juke box of sorts Do you guys have any suggestions?

system specs:
amd sempron 1.6 ghz
dvd rw +- drive
2 gigs of ram
750 gig hard drive
430 watt power supply
pci wifi card
empty pci x16 slot
42" sony lcd tv

[bikeboy]

I may be mistaken, but Nvidia's Linux driver currently lacks hardware decoding of the HD video codecs anyway, so an 8800gtx would be more or less useless. Unfortunately, that could also mean your humble little Sempron won't be able to smoothly decode a Blu-ray video. As I said though, it might just be my misunderstanding.

[brianstokes21]

I built it on the cheap a couple of years ago. It may be time to go with a new motherboard/cpu combo. I was unaware of the lack of linux drivers for hd video. Hopefully, that will change in the near future. No worries, though I still have xp on that computer. I just did not think I would need to go with the 8800gtx card or upgrade the power supply. Maybe I could get a board with integrated graphics that could get the job done? Or if the sempron can hold its on maybe I could throw in a ATI HD 2600XT? Just curious if anyone who has been down this road could give me some insight.

[brianstokes21]

Well I have finished doing my research and I believe that I have come up with a pretty cool solution with the following upgrades.

LITE-ON Black 12X DVD-ROM 32X CD-ROM SATA Blu-ray DVD-ROM Drive Model DH-4O1S-08 - Retail $139.99

CORSAIR ValueSelect 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Desktop Memory - Retail $39.99

Foxconn M7PMX-S LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 7100 / nForce 630i HDMI Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail $64.99

Intel Pentium E2180 Allendale 2.0GHz 1MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor - Retail $69.99

With shipping and all total $343.02

OC'ing should help to make this budget HTPC perform half-way decently don't you think?