Hi, 

 I'm turning my old Dell 4600 (specs below) into a WMC machine and I'm shopping for a new video card that will support HD programming.  I understand that this will come at the expense of a new PSU, but that's fine.  It seems that to get a decent PSU and GPU (for WMC, not for gaming) will run me about $130-$140 or so (i'm considering the following)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102814

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151079 

Questions

1) I'm pretty sure that these are sufficient, but are they too much for this application?

2) Basically, this computer is old and it's going to die sooner than later.  Is there any reason to not wait to install a new motherboard/CPU/RAM ?

Dell Dimension 4600

Pentium 4 - 2.66 GHz

Windows 7 32-bit

3.00 GB RAM

PSU 250W

If you are planning to watch any kind of H264 HD TV, that card will be unstable. If you watch HD MPEG2 it will probably work OK. I had reliable bluray on a 3.2GHz P4 under Vista with it. Windows 7 was pretty ropey stability wise. The 10.1 driver seems to have greatly improved stability.

The AGP cards are unsupported by ATI.

I have that card, it wont need a new power supply, it just uses a floppy power connector.

It's noisy.

Check you can use a standard motherboard/PSU in that system. Dell have a habit of flipping round a few wires on the PSU, and moving the odd motherboard standoff here and there, and making the PSU a slightly different shape.

Thanks for your reply.  There's so many issues with using this 4600 that i've decided to scrap the idea and buy a more updated machine.