cheap VGA to TV?

[gahdzila]

I'm building a new computer for my wife, and thought we might put her old one (the Celeron in my sig) in the den for web surfing on the couch, and MP3's on the stereo.

My problem is that I need to figure out some way to display it...preferably on the TV. We have a really nice Hitachi HDTV monitor with loads of input options, so virtually any TV-out will do.

The Celeron box has onboard video. My preference would be to convert the VGA signal of the onboard video to a signal the TV can understand...RCA video, S-video, componant RGB video, it really doesnt matter. Picture quality is not terribly important, as long as it doesn't look like utter crap. Basically, it just needs to be able to output legible text, so I can browse my MP3 folders and be able to do basic web surfing.

The motherboard is very small, only 1xAGP, 2xPCI, 1xISA slots. Both PCI slots are taken (sound card and NIC), so buying a PCI video card with TV-out isn't possible, nor is using an AGP video card (as it doesn't seem to like using an AGP card and the first PCI card...which is to be expected).

I looked around a bit, found some VGA-to-TV converter boxes, but they're in the $150 range...way too much! The only other thing I can come up with is buying an ISA NIC or sound card, to free up a PCI slot for a video card with TV out.

Any other ideas?

 

[Shade00]

If you're looking for the cheapest way, you would definitely be better off going with an ISA sound card or NIC in order to open up that PCI slot. Then you'd be free to use either an AGP or PCI card. I saw a GF2 MX 200 here at the Ruston Wal-mart for $34 that I believe had S-video out. You could probably get by for less than $50 doing it that way. I don't think there are any decent VGA-to-RGB convertors for less than $100 anyway.

 

[gahdzila]

Thx, shade...I think you're probably right.

Can probably find an ISA NIC on ebay for $2 or so