To be honest with a system like you have already I am surprised you have any performance issues, maybe it the dual display output thats slowing stuff down and you just need a better video card, because I have a similar system spec (but on AMD) here with MCE and GameEx and I do other stuff on it. Seems to fly to me. EDIT: I think a dedicated PC for home theatre use is a must, really not to clever running a secondary display in my opionion, so I would just get a cheapish but new/modern pc purely for your plasma. EDIT2: Something though that people forget is it costs a lot in energy bills to run a PC all year round, about £100 for me.