Want your thoughts and views please?
I have an older Athlon shuttle SN41G2 (I think) XPC small form factor computer, running XP, with 1Gb memory.
I want to use this with my lounge Plasma TV. VGA won't work nicely as the cable is too big to fit in the wall, and the PC input is on the side of my TV, which means the VGA cable will look bad. I have 2 hdmi cables in the wall, so one of these could be fine, or could feed it into the receiver etc.
The onboard graphics don't have hdmi, so I was thinking of installing an hdmi card like this:

http://www.elive.co.nz/sapphire-hd3450-512mb-agp-video-p2374.php
Has anyone used anything like this ok. It's AGP to HDMI essentially, not sure if that's a goer or not.
Video only, but that's ok. $95.
Next would be a PCI sat card for TV. Definitely no freeview HD on this machine! I hear good things about Hauppauge cards so that would be the go. $125.
It's running DDR400 ram at the moment. It has two motherboard slots but each has a 512mb stick.
The board can take 2 Gb so I'd want 2x 1Gb DDR400/PC3200 sticks. $160.
That's an upgrade of say $400 all up. Assuming the custom powersupply can handle these extra cards.
Thing is. Is this the best way to use this money?! I'm wondering what sort of build I could do for new for this, in a standard box (say Antec NSK2480B) I'd get away from the small form factor restrictions.
How cheap can you do a HTPC really do you think?
Is the above approach throwing good money after old tech?