Not the first, not the last, but it was a fun project

I know it has been done before but I have always wanted to do it. Finally the hardware powerful enough and small enough became available. Ion almost pushed me into it but the low power consumption of Zacate made me pull the trigger.










Plays back Blu-Ray rips beautifully with 25-30% CPU usage and no jittering, jumps or stutters.

Going to switch out the crappy laptop HDD for a 30GB SSD when I get it in the mail, should bring the system to life for snappy browsing and all that.

Specs:
Gigabyte E350N-USB3 mini-ITX board
Obviously Zacate E350 CPU and HD4200 graphics integrated in the board.
4GB (low profile stick, barely taller than the RAM socket clips) Kingston DDR3-1333
PicoPSU 80w + adapter
80mm x 20mm thick generic LED fan (unnecessary but I wanted some light in there to show that it was on)
Single channel fan controller on the right side. Again unnecessary but I had it in a box so why not.



Power/reset switches function as original, the LED needs more voltage than the board provides on the power LED or HDD LED jumpers so I didn't bother with trying to make it work.

Power consumption figures later. Kill-a-Watt is connected to this PC right now and finishing a WU.

Pretty inexpensive as a media streamer (can easily be a large file server too).

Board/CPU/GPU = $129 (Asrock is around $100 but I wanted to be able to overclock with the Gigabyte)
PicoPSU+Adapter = $49
4GB low profile DIMM (Zacate is single channel RAM) = $39
HDD (crappy 60GB laptop drive) = $10
NES = $0-20

~$225-240 for a surprisingly powerful HTPC isn't too bad. Can even game at low/medium at 720p if you wanted to.