GIGABYTE GA-E350N AMD E-350D APU AMD A45 FCH Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo $59.99 + Free Ship

So all i need for an htpc build is ram, case, hdd and power supply. Then its good to go? Just want to confirm it will stream 1080p/720p from xbmc without any issues? Thanks

A friend of mine found an old broken home theater amp on craigslist for free. he gutted it and used that. Too big for my taste, but made an elegant solution nonetheless.

Yep. If you have spare parts, great, if not, you can check my post on page 1 for some ram, case, and psu options. If you use OpenELEC, you don't even need an HDD, just a small flash drive.

Can anyone confirm that the HDMI passes audio on this as well as video?

XBMC? I don't think so, unless XMBC supports DXVA now. I use WMC and it works great all the way up to BluRay, but that's with the DXVA codecs installed.

"How about we include one of those giant LPT ports no one has used in 10 years?"
and so they did.

I'm debating between building a small server and buying a 2 bay NAS. I really just need the capabilities of a NAS like the synology but this would end up being cheaper. anyone buying this who is in my shoes?

Yes, XBMC has support for DXVA. Come on back, the water is perfect

I have an old Shuttle SN78 combo with a dead motherboard. Anyone know if this mini-TX board will fit? Shuttles fit some mini-itx, and not others...

I have an E-350 that I use for a file server.

I looked at the straight up mini NAS enclosures but most only supported 2 drives and cost more than an E-350 setup (I paid about $120 for an E-350 w/4gb DDR3 about a year ago).

I prefer having the E-350 over the NAS because it does give some added features. I have Ubuntu running on it and while 90% of the time it's only used as a File Server i also run anything I need going 24/7 on it. I have an IRC client/script, a small FTP server, etc. If i need to torrent something (legally!) i'll do it from there as it's going to save directly to the file server anyway. I mean at the end of the day a NAS would probably work but given the costs i'm happy having something a bit more robust and expandible.

The downside is an E-350 would also require a case, power supply, etc. and to be on the safe side hooked up to a monitor in case the remote goes down. I just have it hooked into my main monitor on the VGA port and swap over in the rare cases when an update hangs or something. A NAS of course is plug and play in most cases but is a lot less flexible.

Speed wise the E-350 works perfectly for this sort of application, i've never seen it really bog down or anything. I don't having it actually playing media though.. it just hosts the file and the actual playback is handled by a media player.