Hi profcolli,
Thanks for the compliment. Here is the deal, unfortunately my MB won't support Core2Duo since it is also an old MB
Few months ago, I had SO many problems with this game and I took SamuriHL's advice and did a clean OS install to Vista. Once I did that I have been trouble free and having so much fun with this PC therefore I was kind of lazy to build another one. My father taught me something like that, Son "if something is working, just leave it alone and don't touch it" On the other hand, I think the latest GPU helps a lot by unloading all the graphic processing load to there in order to leave this old P4 only running less than 40% when playing BD. On the other hand, I've Core2Duo on another PC, yes, it is faster when I surf web and doing multi-tasking applications. But again with this old P4 PC, I just simply won't see the different when I JUST use this as my Media Center PC to play the back up BD and Imgburn it is as fast as the other one therefore I feel I just don't need another faster PC for this purpose only. The bottom line is with an old P4 if you do it right and if you just use it for playing back up BD, it is perfectly fine. I guarantee that!
My plan is as soon as the ATI 4XXX release, I plan to get that and try that and hope it will give me a better sound such as using LPCM 8 channels first. Then when the Asus HDMI1.3 sound card release, I plan to upgrade that and see that it will do both, 8 channels LPCM and bit-stream. So with the sound card and special TMT build, I hope I will able to do bit-stream and complete this system at that time. Yes, I plan to build another HTPC but I want to wait and see how the Intel G45 MB plays out before I do that.
Last, I just watch Bucket List last night and I never ever heard that such as realistic voice, from Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, and it is truly amazing with just 2 channels PCM and can't wait to do 8 channels LPCM or bit-stream in the near future!