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Member since:
2008-10-22
For case fans, I'd recommend anything with two ball bearings and an potentiometer for manual control. If you're going to go with AMD, there's no sense in buying the last generation unless you stumble on a really good bargain. I've recently built a system with an AMD A6-3650 Llano APU and used a Rosewill RFX-80BL case fan (80mm, dual bb, and pot). There are several FM1 socket motherboards available from the best vendors but you'll probably find that bare bones systems are cheaper to buy than if you bought all the parts separately. The AMD Llano series have reviewed well for both low-midrange gaming systems and I've seen at least one HTPC oriented review (Anandtech?).
If you want to go with an entirely passive cooled system, I'd recommend looking at the Shuttle XS35GT-804 which is an Intel Atom D510 with an Nvidia ION GPU. Expect to pay a little more since these are basically netbook parts in a tiny barebones desktop case. The oly downside is that it can only take up to 2 Gb RAM but that should be sufficient for most single task HTPC needs. Optionally, it can take a slim Blu-Ray player to round out your HTPC options. Again, this will probably be a more expensive option but its footprint is ideal if you want to minimize the space it uses near your display.