Well I want to be able to play some games on the TV, so I guess the idea is a bit more than an HTPC, strictly speaking. The case is certainly designed to fit a PCI card, I just can't figure out how much space it's going to have for that particular card.

So this Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 Ultimate seems to be just about the best passively cooled GPU money can buy. (There's a Gigabyte 5750 that's 'passively cooled' but it draws so much power and produces so much heat that it's almost certainly hopeless for my small HTPC purposes.) The Sapphire is, howev...

Thanks for your insight. Apropos of bottlenecking, there's a pretty useful article at anandtech comparing Atom, CULV Core 2, and Core i3 boards in the form factor we're interested in here. They bench systems based on all three with and without a discrete graphics card. The results jibe with what you...

I'm going to build little HTPC for the living room, mostly to pull duty displaying h.264 video on the tv. I've got gigabit ethernet in the wall, and will be pulling the video off a server in the basement. Since it's a living room pc, my primary concern is no noise and low power consumption. However,...

If it's just an OS/applications (no media storage) drive you need, you should definitely get an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD. They're the best SSD's around, other than the higher-priced Intels, they've got really fast access and write speeds (equal to the intels), TRIM to prevent slowdown over time, and best of...

Presumably he's referring to the brick that mini-box sells on their website along with the PicoPSU. It's got the following stats, according to their site: 12v/12.5A AC-DC Power Adapter AC-DC 12V, 12.5A Switching Power Adapter (110/220V) - AC adapter for higher power applications - AC INPUT: 100 -240...

That 5670 is pretty nice bang for the buck. It will definitely keep your kid in Starcraft. The trick for what you're trying to do is get as much GPU as you can afford, and deprioritize the CPU/Mobo. Which I think you've done pretty well with that AMD board.