HTPC, £400 budget

[Rocker]

My mate is thinking about an HTPC, he has a budget of £400.

The requirements are:
HDMI port
Blu-Ray reader (not a writer but must be able to write CD/DVDs)
1TB HDD
Classy case (I know! lol)

He likes the Antec Fusion Remote HTPC Case Here but obviously at £135 it's eating into the £400 budget quite a bit.

What would you guys suggest?

Typically in the past I would have went with AMD, however these days I'm not so sure, having not built a system since my last one 2 years ago, I'm a bit out of touch with the AMD - Intel battle!

Cheers

EDIT:
I shoud note that the system will be used only for playing music, surfing the internets, watching DVDs and general HTPC uses, no gaming or anything strenuous like that.

 

[Orcvader]

If it's only for those uses, this should be enough. The motherboard has a HDMI port. If he went with a cheaper case we can squeeze in a quad core.

I'm not sure however if it will be fine playing Blu-ray.

 

[Rocker]

Yeah I was thinking of something along similar lines with a:

CPU: Intel Pentium Dual-Core G6950 2.80GHz (Socket LGA1156)
MB: Asus P7H55-M/USB3 Intel H55 (Socket 1156) DDR3 microATX Motherboard

Comes to just over £400 but thats ok.

Im just concerned about the price of the case, if we can find a similar or cheaper good looking case, we can improve the inners!