I have an Acer Revo for the bedroom, has HDMI, wifi, Hard Disk, on chip HD decoding and wireless keyboard and mouse, never have any problems with it, although anything Atom based you are expected to use the less intensive interfaces...

But silent and only needs power and an output  plugged in to it and can mount to the back of your TV if you want, only thing I would say, to turn it on you need to press the button on it, you can't turn it on via remote (Although I use one of the remote power sockets, and set to auto power on on mains in the bios)

Yeah there's a special team working on the port for it (release of the port is TBC so could be an age before it comes out, and not sure the support is going to be as good as the main distro), but I expect that it will be a very stripped down version, if you can get one at the RRP then it's worth a try, but I imagine its going to be pushing the limits!

I think the video playback itself should be fine, I just know how slow XBMC can be on slower processors..

... I'm getting one of those as soon as they are available and I can find one, there are a lot of things you could end up doing on this!

Imagine if you hooked this up with an arduino as well

(Sorry for thread hijack)

I've looked at the revo's before and they look nice but are just a tad expensive for me at the mo.

I'm using an old P4 shuttle for my XBMC and it works great, can't remember the exact spec but think its got a P4 3ghz in it with more memory and dedicated gfx it works fine really.  Best of all I only paid £25 for it on ebay, supplied the cpu & gfx myself but then I had them lying around.  Only problem with it is that the gfx is AGP, and there aren't many AGP HDMI gfx cards around with audio so instead I'm just using the onboard optical out to my surround sound.

If you wanted managed to get an old shuttle from ebay you could whip the bits out and use that case, you might have to drill some holes for the screw holes to get the motherboard to fit but a little bit of work and it should go together nicely.  If I could get a PCIE shuttle cheap I might think about doing the same myself.

Why do you need DDR3? A decent graphics card designed to actually do HTPC stuff and a half decent processor is all you need afaik. RAM amount will obviously be important but from DDR2 to DDR3 I dont think there will be much difference.

Why do you need DDR3? A decent graphics card designed to actually do HTPC stuff and a half decent processor is all you need afaik. RAM amount will obviously be important but from DDR2 to DDR3 I dont think there will be much difference.

Only need DDR3 so I can steal half the RAM from my microserver, otherwise I'd need to buy some.

As for a TV box, I love XBMC and havent seen anything that comes close to it  (except boxee which is more expensive than my intended build) in terms of slick interface and features.

Quote from: sexytw on February 07, 2012, 09:56:38 AM

Quote from: Adrock on February 06, 2012, 23:16:17 PM

Why do you need DDR3? A decent graphics card designed to actually do HTPC stuff and a half decent processor is all you need afaik. RAM amount will obviously be important but from DDR2 to DDR3 I dont think there will be much difference.

Only need DDR3 so I can steal half the RAM from my microserver, otherwise I'd need to buy some.

As for a TV box, I love XBMC and havent seen anything that comes close to it  (except boxee which is more expensive than my intended build) in terms of slick interface and features.

You can download the boxee software for free, I looked at it on my PC at work the other month just to see what it was like but haven't really used it past that 5 minute play.

Ah yes, I was referring to the official boxee hardware. Regardless of if I run XBMC or BOXEE I want the cheapest hardware to play it on.

I just need to find a cheap second hand CPU/Mobo combo that can take PCI-E gfx and DDR3 and I'm in business.