I'm not sure I understand the appeal of the higher priced atom boards either, ION adds considerable cost to allow HD playback but with a more capable CPU you wouldn't need it. If your budget for CPU and mobo together is $100 or less and you don't necessarily care about HD playback today, is there an...

I've seen it suggested that some newer PCI slots support 'true' gigabit but maybe that's not the case with that pv530 board. 266 MB/s seems to be the max for 32 bit conventional PCI in general, would seem to be about enough for full duplex gigabit ignoring overhead. Onboard gigabit would be preferab...

Can anyone comment on any VIA based motherboards that may be worthy of consideration for low-cost, low-power applications? A local store carries the ASRock pv530 motherboard which is priced similarly to the cheaper Atom D410 boards but claims full HD acceleration, downsides I can see vs the atoms ar...

If it turns out to be tricky to find the card you want with the outputs you want, there's also the route of getting some kind of external converter box/cable.

I also have one of the wd green 2 tb drives and am interested in building a system that could take several (say 4 max) of the same or similar drives when I want to upgrade later. In the specs they quote 6 W for read/write, but will the drives ever be drawing significantly more than that, say on star...

Are there any tv tuners that incorporate hardware encoding into h.264 or at least mpeg-4? There seem to be some that do mpeg-2 which is not really much help. On the topic of SheevaPlug like devices, are there any yet that incorporate a SATA controller? A cheap gigabit NAS with some server functional...