HTPC questions Options

[priorax]

Hey guys,

I'm looking at setting up a HTPC and wanted to check by people who know what they are doing about a few specs.

Mostly, could an AMD x2 245, 2gb DDR3 ram with a motherboard with an on-board ATi HD4200 graphics chipset run 1080p? If not, what is the cheapest cpu/graphics card I could add to make it run 1080p?

EDIT: Currently thinking of using of putting on Ubuntu with XMBC if I go with a nVidia graphics card, then multi-task it as a file server and unplug the dodgy NASrun

[R4N]

my exp with xbmc on linux has been great!. If you do choose that path pop in an nvidia gfx card so you can offload 1080p to the GPU. At this stage XBMC does not support gpu offloading for HD content on windows.

In terms of the remote, the above post will work, but on windows XBMC will handle WMC controls automatically. So you just have to program your harmony remote to use windows media center controls (I did this on my dads media center and it works quite well).