My HTPC is nothing special, but it looks nice, sounds nice, works for me. Off the shelf Compaq Presario CQ5210F (2.7 x2 Athlon II, 3 GBs dual channel ram, 500 gb HDD, DVD-/+RW (working on putting a Blu-Ray in this, should be next week), 7.1 Sound card (what an amazing difference it made, the resources that the onboard sound used...were amazing. The speed increase was quite unexpected.), and GeForce GT220. LG HDTV, Logitech 5.1 speaker system, added two extra speakers for the 7.1 (worked, lol) People say off the shelf PCs aren't worth a darn and shouldn't be upgraded, but this thing has proven me wrong. It's rock solid stable, plays all of the games I throw at it, and movies look incredible in HD, and I can't wait to see what Blu-Ray looks like. I will be upgrading the processor to the Propus family Athlon II x4 630. (A quad for $99? Oh yeah.) and max out the RAM (which is four, sadly) I'm not needing a big amount of power, just enough to keep things afloat and then some. I'm hoping that helps some.