^tWiSt^ Wrote:that's true but for what I know XBMC sucks with the video chipset intel X4500HD at the moment...
...anyone can confirm this?
Actually, there are a lot of mini-ITX boards out there now that support Intel Core 2 or AMD AM2 processors.
Intel:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...57%3A20949
AMD:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...57%3A20949
Some are pretty damn cheap! There's also the J&W Minix 780G, which is an AMD board and not listed on Newegg's site.
AMD's CPUs are slower, so you'd need to get a better one whereas with Intel even a low-end Core 2 would suffice. My HTPC uses an overclocked Celeron E1200 and renders high-bitrate 1080p H.264 just fine! However, the one thing they have going for them is that the 790g, and I think 780g and GeForce 8200 motherboard chipsets support LPCM over HDMI. Not sure if XBMC even takes advantage of that yet, though.
Worst-case scenario, slap on a discrete low-end DX10 graphics card and you should be good to go. Throw a nice, big cooler on the CPU so you can run it fanless, ie. Sunbeam Core Contact, Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme, Tuniq Tower, etc. I think a single quiet 120mm fan spinning at a low speed to exhaust excess heat would be ideal, though.
Not sure how much power such a system would use. If you can get it to draw less than 120W, you might be able to get away with a 120W picoPSU. That's a fair bit of a stretch though. There are also some fanless PSUs out there, but they're pricey. A good quiet PSU with a low-speed fan would still be good and a lot cheaper.
but i think this stuff will be a good starting point to build the final XBMC htpc
) I should note this mobo support hdmi audio, but linux still don't support that chip. You can get analog or SPDIF out tho.
