Intel Atom As A Media Center Will it work ?

[Iniyila 2]

Hello everyoneNow we can see intel atom cpu (those with a little power consumption and also not very high performance) are just coming to PCs and intel has released some motherboard based on them. so lets see what are the advantages and what are the disadvantages, so i will start with Intel Desktop Board D510MO board. this board is based on D510 intel atom , and according to this benchmark :http://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html it is nearly same as Intel Pentium 4 3.73GHz, so the performance is not very much. The price of this board is below 80$ i found some markets are selling it even for 60$ and with this price you get a motherboard with a cpu on it so the price is not very bad. the power consumption of this board with 2.5 inch h.d.d and a module of ram will be around 25 watts in normal usage and it gets up to 60 watts in its full load, so just look at the psu of your case and see the difference , have you ever tried to see how much your pc consumes in idle mode ? i tested one of my pcs which is a core2dou and in idle mode it uses around 150watts, so here we have a 125 watts gap, ans this is the biggest advantage of using these boards. this board comes only with one pciexpress 16x slot which you can use it for extra graphic power if you don't like the onboard intel one. so there is no pci and you should only buy external usb devices, it comes with 8 usb support so there is no problem in that. So i was thinking that this board is not very fast in daily works but it has the advantage of low power consumption, and as i was searching for seeing its performance in playing hd files i found the below youtube link, it shows the board playing a 1080p movie trailer and the cpu usage is not very high as he shows it using task manager. our home theater is broken and we were deciding to buy a new one but i saw this and i thought getting one with a sata dvd-rom or an external one will do a huge job, we can use the load speakers and the amplifire of our current home theater (because only disc playback is broken) and connecting one of these boards in their little cases (which are much smaller than our current DVD player) and buying the full case (motherboard + 2GB ram + psu + mini itx case + dvd-rw) costs around 200$ which is a nice price too because a new home theater will cost us at least 350$, i thought about getting one of these for using it as a media center, so we can play dvd as well as connecting to internet and many other things because it is a PC. what do you think ? will it work ?here is the link to the mentioned video : http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ should another version of these boards with nvidia ion is available which is around 150$ but it is much powerful than this board in graphic things and you can even play games with it too, so maybe it can be a worthy upgrade even for a PC.