So I was inspired to put together this thread and include what you can get for a moderate amount of money. If I was going to put together a HTPC this is what I would put in my system. Case - Antec Fusion Remote Black HTPC Case PSU - Corsair VX550W 550W Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H CPU - AMD Athlon II X4 600E HSF - Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 LP Low Profile HTPC 3 Heatpipe Heatsink RAM - Corsair XMS3 CMX4GX3M2A1600C7 4GB DDR3 2X2GB HDD - Western Digital WD1001FALS Caviar Black 1TB BR-ROM Drive - Liteon IHOS104 4X BLU-RAY Reader BD-ROM Drive OEM Sound card - AuzenTech X-FI Hometheater Total price: ~ 1000 CDN I went with a 65W CPU for low thermal output, and I upgraded stock cooling to the freezer 64 LP. That is a tip top of the line sound card which takes up 30% of the cost alone. Although that's really what a HTPC is all about isn't it? That HDD is pretty much the best you can buy with read/write speeds that rival the 300gb velociraptor and costs a third the price for triple the storage. In all honesty if you wanted a pretty beast gaming rig all you would have to do is buy a good video card and this system would perform very well in todays most demanding games. You could save some money by going with a less expensive case, but the Antec Fusion really is the best looking HTPC case ever made. You're definitely going to want to replace the stock fans that come with it to some Noctua 120mm ones for near silent operation. So if you want to know what you can build for 1000 bucks, this would be it.
