Arctic MC001-N HTPC (XBMC & OpenElec Compatible) Barebones - $99 Shipped

Quote from Genius4sho : 30gb SSD for an HTPC!? I can only rip one blu ray. Try adding a 2TB hard drive and now we are talking.

The internal drive is just for OS. Serious HTPC users will always have their library externally on a separate file server or a NAS.

Which of the openelec builds will be best for this? I have a couple of sodimms and an SD card, that should be enough to complete this system right?

This thing is crawling slow, absolutely will not run Netflix or Windows comfortably for that matter...you're better off buying a refurbed C2D system from TigerDirect for $130.

Quote from bonkman : If you think you need an i3 or greater for DVR and hulu/netflix, you are clearly deluded. I'm running an Athlon XII 4050e and it works fine -- even recording three channels simultaneously and streaming to another computer.

what software are you running for dvr?

Platinum Micro (the $99 ebay seller) and aaawave (the $89 seller) are really the same company [cortera.com].

That said, I bought 1 from aaawave.com, and their website returned an error. Paypal charged me, and I could see a receipt on their website. So I assume the order went through. I won't know for sure till I receive the unit though.

Definitely caveat emptor.

Quote from swapped : what software are you running for dvr?

wmc7.

Quote from RavenSEAL : This thing is crawling slow, absolutely will not run Netflix or Windows comfortably for that matter...you're better off buying a refurbed C2D system from TigerDirect for $130.

Do you have personal experience?

According to the guys at OpenELEC [openelec.tv], this box runs 1080p BD rips just fine, and navigation is smooth.

Quote from garysixpack : Do you have personal experience? According to the guys at OpenELEC [openelec.tv], this box runs 1080p BD rips just fine, and navigation is smooth.

yeah but netflix is an entirely different beast. silverlight is horrible and i think uses CPU for decoding exclusively. the atom simply doesn't run it....

Quote from newcronos : The internal drive is just for OS. Serious HTPC users will always have their library externally on a separate file server or a NAS.

as long as we're overgeneralizing, "serious" HTPC users will always have a TV tuner hooked up. It'd be silly to buy an HTPC to do something that a $50 wifi BR/DVD player can do.

Quote from RavenSEAL : This thing is crawling slow, absolutely will not run Netflix or Windows comfortably for that matter...you're better off buying a refurbed C2D system from TigerDirect for $130.

Uh, what? If you can't get W7 to work smoothly on a D525 with >2gb RAM, the problem is you not knowing how to optimize windows. Not the computer.

Quote from RavenSEAL : This thing is crawling slow, absolutely will not run Netflix or Windows comfortably for that matter...you're better off buying a refurbed C2D system from TigerDirect for $130.

Quote from garysixpack : Do you have personal experience? According to the guys at OpenELEC [openelec.tv], this box runs 1080p BD rips just fine, and navigation is smooth.

Aren't you talking about two different things?
1: Running windows, silverlight and netflix
2. Playing 1080p rips (not necessarily running windows and silverlight)

Quote from garysixpack : Do you have personal experience? According to the guys at OpenELEC [openelec.tv], this box runs 1080p BD rips just fine, and navigation is smooth.

Yeah, as whiteshadow says, netflix currently uses MS Silverlight which is a horrid bit of code. Much like Flash before 10.1, it can't offload to a GPU.

However, in theory, that means it COULD be fixed. Either by Netflix moving away from Silverlight to a platform that doesn't suck or by MS updating Silverlight so that it doesn't suck.

But yeah, in it's current state, there's no way this plays HD Netflix. If Netflix even works on openELEC (I'm not sure that it does). OpenELEC is just a bare-minimum OS, essentially Linux tuned for XBMC purposes.

Quote from bonkman : as long as we're overgeneralizing, "serious" HTPC users will always have a TV tuner hooked up. It'd be silly to buy an HTPC to do something that a $50 wifi BR/DVD player can do.

Lots of people do things on their HTPC besides watch movies and TV. I have a home built HTPC in the living room and have no interest in hooking up a TV Tuner. I consider myself "serious."

I won't TD it, but it's not a good deal, considering you're likely get rid of it when the slow Atom infuriates you. I have an Atom based HTPC. It's ok for running XBMC, but with a large library, even that can be slow. You can forget using WMC on it for live TV or PVR usage. And Netflix / YouTube in HD comes across as a slide show.

If you want something strictly for XBMC, get a RasberryPI. If you want a real HTPC, get a Ivy Bridge Celeron or i3.

I'm sure there will be those coming in saying they love their Atom based HTPC. They're in denial. I was one of them. Again, ok for XBMC, but at that point, you can get 3 RasberryPI's for the price of one of these and they do the same thing.

Quote from namlook : Lots of people do things on their HTPC besides watch movies and TV. I have a home built HTPC in the living room and have no interest in hooking up a TV Tuner. I consider myself "serious."

And I use my HTPC as my fileserver. My post was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek response to the person I quoted, hence why it started the way it did. The beauty of HTPC is that you can custom-tailor it to do exactly what you want, no more, not less. So telling someone what "serious" HTPC users do is a slap in the face to anyone who does something different.

Though OOC, what do you use it for besides movies and TV? I'm always looking for new applications.

Also, do you have no interest because you just don't watch TV? Honestly, having an HTPC serve as my cable box has made it impossible to use any other form of cable box. To each their own, of course -- I'm just curious.