[SwingSultan]

as i said you need a gpu capable of decoding h.264 etc. but it doesnt need to be an expensive card. some people here are using high end cards in their htpcs which is in my opinion a waste of power, money and time if those people happen to work for their money. i think that those people dont understand the meaning of the words dedicated system. the trick when building a htpc is that you carefully choose the hardware and computing power you need to run an efficient, cool (due to the smaller case size) and especially quiet system. you will be fine with a radeon hd 2400 or 2600. if you get a radeon hd 3450 or a 3650 cheaper than the 2xxx models go for it. they are newer and support power saving features. the rest is more or less the same since the gpus only differ in details.