I really like the sound of this, but with such a small enclosure and no real CPU power management for AMD chips, would it not be more practical to go down the Intel Core 2 or Atom route?

couldnt find an atom board that had dvi or hdmi and optical audio. But the atom route woukd have been alot cheaper

ok I've now got the board chip and everything i need except case. I'm gonna build tomorow case or no case and let you know how it turns out might even drop a few pics.

I have never read that anyone has been able to get hdmi output to work? Though I have not really looked into it that much. ;)

hdmi should work fine its only an adapter and dvi carries all hdmi signal aswell as analogue. By the way its a no no for the graphics at the mo will look into it again l8r but its gonna be xp with xmbc on it for the mo but must say xmbc is pretty impressive and you can just put that on on its own. But i think the xmbc install is lacking some aceleration hence the basic xp pro install.

I think the most annoying part is the geforce 8200 graphics are supported according to the efi strings in circulation as this doeant exist as a standalone card. Not from my research anyway any help would be gr8

I tried the osx version of XBMC on my main system and it seems to run better than the win version. This truely is a nice piece of media centre software if only i could get that damn geforce 8200 graftin

I have an 8200-based mobo (in my Acer X1200). I have seen the EFI strings also, but also am not aware of any standalone cards. I think the 8200 is always IGP.

I tried setting 8200 256M in EFI string and setting my BIOS to always allocate 256M, but no dice.

Its hard to find any discussion of the 8200, and even the more popular IGPs (9300/9400) seem to have trouble with shared memory. :(

this is something i want to sort

BTW instead of using XBMC try using Plex they are almost the same thing but plex is still being updated