This is my first forum post but I'm a long time viewer!
I've been considering building a media pc for streaming videos and music to from my main deskop which runs loud and isn't exactly lounge worthy. When I got given a NES the size looked quite nice for a media PC case under a TV and I remembered this.
I have some questions that it would be great if any of you could help me with, I don't want to get to far into this and realise I've made a stupid mistake.
My first consideration was if I used an EEE PC 900 motherboard there would be several advantages:
Low Power
Small Form factor which would fit easily inside the NES case
quiet, only the one fan (CPU)
Power supply doesn't have to be inside the case
Quite cheap
Small built in SSD big enough for the OS and maybe some emulators
To save you looking them up here are the specs of an EEE 900 board:
900MHz Intel Celeron Processor
SD Card Reader
VGA out
Mic+Headphone sockets
LAN
3 USB ports
Sound+Graphics built into the board
512MB RAM
Wifi card
First off, I'm not sure whether this is powerful enough (With an undecided Linux distro) to handle the HD Video Streaming I require (can VGA out handle high enough resolutions?), any thougths there? Seccondly seeing as I want it to be a neat and tidy mod. All of the ports are on the sides of the board, and I want everything to plug neatly into the back, I'd have to make my own I/O Area which sounds like a bit of a nightmare.
I'm considering going for a Mini or Micro ATX/ITX (I'm not sure what the differences are) becuase it will offer more power, even if it is much hotter, more expensive, bigger and louder.
I haven't decided what Optical Drive I want to go for, but it will pop out of the cartridge door. I was hoping Blu Ray but there's no way and EEE PC could handle that. I'm also assuming that I'll have to go for a laptop sized drive which will bump up the price.
Having the ability to use the dolphin emulator to play Wii games on it would be pretty kick ass, only something I just considered because of the latest couple of eps.
Any thoughts would be appreciated
Sadly I have 1st Year Computer Science Exams coming up, so this will probably have to take a back seat.
EDIT: Fixed a bullet point that was annoying me