Next time I'll hopefully have a bigger budget. For now this will do the job.

What's hilarious is people have been building HTPC for the last 5 years, starting with single core 3ghz cpus, but everyone keeps recommending faster and faster chips for them.

The cap cards do the encoding, the vid cards do the decoding, and the hard drives don't really use the cpu either. It's just everyone wants a muscle-system.

I'll just build mine out of whatever old parts I have left over next time I upgrade my computer. Stuffed in a HTPC case and with a cap card or two will do just fine.