I bought an HP S3430F Slimline HTPC and I've been setting it up today. Comes with the LG Blu-Ray / HD DVD combo drive, 4 GB RAM, AMD Quad processor, wireless internet, remote control, TV card etc.  It is a powerful little box, one-third the size of a desktop PC, so it fits nicely in my A/V credenza. I also bought a long range wireless keyboard and mouse so I can use the PC from up to 30 feet away. Connects to my Onkyo TX-SR805 via HDMI.

Bought it mostly for Blu Ray movies and it works well for that. What I hadn't thought about so much was playing music through it, but I've been ripping CD's in lossless format with excellent results using  Windows Media Player.  Ripping now as I write this post using my plasma TV for a monitor.

Given the price of Blu-Ray players and a music system like Sonus, this seems to me to be a great alternative.  Has the added benefit of full PC usage as well.

Still experimenting with it but so far this HTPC seems like a great way to go.

Mike 

That sounds pretty cool. Expensive for just a blu-ray player, but you can run games and surf with it.

Do you know what graphics card you're using in the PC? Are you getting 1080p out to your TV?  If you are runnning it through your AVR and the PC has a TV tuner, can you have TV in a window and doing other PC stuff in other windows with the audio going through your AVR? How does streaming video from the web look with that setup?

OK, a lot of questions but I'm intrigued.  Let us know how that's working out for you.

The graphics card is an Nvidia 8500GT with 256 megs of dedicated memory.

My TV is 1080i, about 3 years old, so it pre-dates 1080p. Still, the picture quality is very good.

It connects to my AVR via HDMI.  The PC does have a TV card but I am not using it yet.  Satellite box is connected  separately. You can run audio and perform other functions on the PC. All of the video I have streamed from the web is standard definition.  It looks better than I thought it might but its not HDTV.

The HP Slimline S3430F comes with 4 GB RAM so multi-tasking is not a problem. It also has Vista 64-Bit so all of the RAM can be utilized.

Its been a lot of fun for me so far.

I've loaded about 150 music CD's so far and that allows me to access the music more easily.  I didn't anticipate using it so much for music.

If someone is looking for just a  standalone Blu-Ray player, this is a more expensive alternative - there are more cost effective solutions.

For me, its a reasonable value proposition given all that it can do. 

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