Building a HTPC and an office workstation on a budget (I've tried out the HD4000 in my Streacom build and it's fairly impressive). HTPC won't be used for games at all, purely playing back hi res and other video files plus some web browsing. Possibly playback from dvd/blu-ray but I'll have a dedicated blu-ray player (Oppo). Any encoding will be done on another computer, I use a network drive to store my files so barely any encoding will be done on the HTPC. From what I've read, the HD2500 doesn't have a lot of grunt in games, but playback should be fine.

I presume that it's ideal for basic workstation use (internet mainly and word processing/spreadsheets, no gaming)? I am upgrading the office computer from a Pentium 4.

Brendan

Haven't seen any head-head video quality comparisons of the 3220 vs the 3225. But, should be fine. Only $15 diff between the two, though.

I paid $80 for the i3's LOL.

I've been using an i3-2120 with the HD2000 in my HTPC and I've had no problems. It has played every video I've thrown at it without issues.

At work we had several different generations of Intel graphics and never had any complaints about video performance for basic office tasks.

An i3 would be overkill for this.
Check if Sandy Bridge Pentiums and Celerons are still as cheap as they used to.
You probably wouldn't even need a mainstream CPU for this but those Sandys are so cheap...