ITX based Media PC advice

linktoinsanity · 6 Nov 2011 at 18:26

Hi all, I am planning on building a small ITX based PC for the living room. As I am planning on putting it where the Wii currently lives it cannot be much bigger, so essentially a shuttle sort of size. Due to the high cost of hard disks at the moment I'm going to opt for a smaller SSD to boot from and use the network to stream Movies etc off.

Uses:

-Web Browsing
-Play music, using network
-Play basic games (DOS games, Indie games etc), using SSD
-Play DVDs/Blueray (if the gfx card can cope with HD)
-Eventually use as a Backup file server when hard disks come back down in price

I want to do all this for the cheapest possible price. This motherboard has gained my attention: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-365-GI Only thing is I'm not sure whether an Atom would cope with playing DVDs etc and whether that onboard graphics chipset would be up to much...

I would be happy going for a reasonably powered socket 775 system though if I can get one cheaply enough. The system also needs to be reasonably quiet and will be running all day most days, so needs to be able to be powered off a low powered PSU (300W say).

So any help with basicly an ITX based Media PC would be appreciated. Thanks.

95thrifles · 6 Nov 2011 at 18:33

Personally Id look at H61 based mobo with an i3 CPU(when back in stock) might be a bit more but will give you a lot more oomph and the onboard gfx will mean you can skip the gpu

linktoinsanity · 7 Nov 2011 at 12:17

Chers 95, I'll look into that.

Any more suggestions?

R088ieS86 · 7 Nov 2011 at 12:31

OcUK don't stock any but another option would be to find an A75 ITX board (EG link) and match it up with a Llano APU

Better onboard graphics than the i3 (blu ray play back with ease) and you can choose from dual, triple or quad core depending on how much processing power you want. (atoms like the one you linked struggle with flash in browsers)

linktoinsanity · 8 Nov 2011 at 20:07

R088ieS86 said:
OcUK don't stock any but another option would be to find an A75 ITX board (EG link) and match it up with a Llano APU

Better onboard graphics than the i3 (blu ray play back with ease) and you can choose from dual, triple or quad core depending on how much processing power you want. (atoms like the one you linked struggle with flash in browsers)

I was looking at the A8 series CPU. Thanks, I'll read up more on them.