New Project

After looking for some time at the various Home Theater PC's and small media boxes, including the Tvix m-6500a, I have decided to instead build my own Home Theater PC. In the end, it seemed like the small price premium was worth it to have an entire PC, rather than a media box. This will allow me the flexibility to use the box as both a PC and as a HD movie storage/streaming device, which is really what I'm looking for.

Here's what I've put together from Newegg. I'm not sure about the case, so if you have any recommendations, please let me know.

Basically I need a really fast processor, since all of the HD decoding is done by the proc and not the video card, at least when you use XBMC and Ubuntu. I've got an extra eSATA 500gb drive left over from the TiVo, so I'm going to try to re-purpose that for HD storage. Having a motherboard that doesn't need a video card is pretty sick, especially one with HDMI onboard. Welcome to the future.

I'm probably going to order this soon, and I'll be sure to post updates as to how its coming along. For those who may be interested, I came up with the list of hardware by reading the xbmc forum.

Any comments, advice or questions?