This looks good. So, what's the status quo on capable living room PCs? I have been using Macs and a PS3 for years now, but if there was a small and good looking box that could handle modern games this might be an option for me. Any recommendations?
I recently built a few living-room/gaming PCs which was pretty cheap, and a great learning experience for my 10-year-old son, who is delighted to talk about building his own computer. Most gaming graphics cards these days have HDMI out, which is all you really need.
The folks at Dell/Alienware have made a small box to fit exactly the need you're thinking about, I decided not to go with it because it wasn't available with an SSD, but it's an impressive little bundle. http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx
Thanks - I would probably put something together with individual parts, as I already did back when we needed to connect PCs to our not so flat TVs via VGA, Component or SCART Adapters. However that box you linked to has a nice form factor and price tag. Not a fan of the Sci-Fi design though, but I just looked for some cases and there's some good stuff available - seems like a performant and A/V-receiver-seized PC is easy to pull off.
I used this case for my buildout. It's small, but supports full-size graphics cards and multiple internal hard drive bays. It's more or-less invisible on my bookshelf next to other components. It also doesn't have any drive bays, which looks very sleek and I just download everything from Steam (or similar) these days anyway.
Yes, that's exactly what I already had in mind. To be honest until yesterday I didn't even realize that Mini-ITX could handle the newer sockels and a decent PCIe graphic card. But with knowing that, this is a very good alternative to a console.
