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<blockquote data-quote="gxtracker" data-source="post: 84696" data-attributes="member: 14004">The speed of the memory in your system does not affect the number of shows you can record at a time. Since you're in North America you will be looking at a Hardware Encoding Analog card - which means that the TV card will encode and compress the TV signal and push it right through the PCI bus to the Hard drive. Now with that said, Memory speed can have a great effect on system performance. Its hard to qualify into an exact number because of the way the CPU, Northbridge, RAM and other subsystems communicate with eachother.In most cases, having more RAM is better than having faster RAM - only because if your system runs out of RAM, it has to resort to using SWAP space on the hard drive which is much slower than even the slowest RAM you could ever put in your system.Most of us get away with only having 512mb of RAM in our systems because:A) they are dedicated HTPC systems that only take care of media related taskb) we have removed unused processes and services from windows which frees up a huge amount of RAM.For example, on a fresh boot my XP HTPC uses less than 80mb of RAM once fully loaded. Many of the services that would take up that extra space have been disabled like help and support, themes, security center, etc...with a dedicated HTPC, you have to give into a mindset that this device is more of an embedded computing system with a dedicated task - not a general purpose computer used for work, games, internet, etc... once you put yourself in that mindset and configure the system in that respect, then you'll be suprised what you can achieve with relatively modest hardware.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="gxtracker, post: 84696, member: 14004"] The speed of the memory in your system does not affect the number of shows you can record at a time. Since you're in North America you will be looking at a Hardware Encoding Analog card - which means that the TV card will encode and compress the TV signal and push it right through the PCI bus to the Hard drive. Now with that said, Memory speed can have a great effect on system performance. Its hard to qualify into an exact number because of the way the CPU, Northbridge, RAM and other subsystems communicate with eachother. In most cases, having more RAM is better than having faster RAM - only because if your system runs out of RAM, it has to resort to using SWAP space on the hard drive which is much slower than even the slowest RAM you could ever put in your system. Most of us get away with only having 512mb of RAM in our systems because: A) they are dedicated HTPC systems that only take care of media related task b) we have removed unused processes and services from windows which frees up a huge amount of RAM. For example, on a fresh boot my XP HTPC uses less than 80mb of RAM once fully loaded. Many of the services that would take up that extra space have been disabled like help and support, themes, security center, etc... with a dedicated HTPC, you have to give into a mindset that this device is more of an embedded computing system with a dedicated task - not a general purpose computer used for work, games, internet, etc... once you put yourself in that mindset and configure the system in that respect, then you'll be suprised what you can achieve with relatively modest hardware. [/QUOTE]

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