Hi,
I will be building a HTPC for a family member this XMAS so now I am starting to think about different platforms. It is going to be a fairly low-budget build (€200-250). It will be used to watch everything up to 14Mbps 1080p rips but NOT full BD, and lossless audio support is not necessary. Native 24p is not important either (I understand this is an issue with SB)

I don't really want to use low power solutions (Atom+Ion, or E-350). I have an Atom+Ion nettop myself and it is okay, but i'd prefer to build something with a little more oomph and future potential. Also I think the value for money is not so good any more.

The low-end Sandy Bridge processors (for example Pentium G620 or the new Celeron G530) look attractive because they are cheap (~€50) and low power consumption, and the performance is many times greater than an Atom.

I don't want to use a discrete GPU because the case I am looking at is too small. Also I don't want to add unecessary cost.

So my question is:
-does anyone use something similar with OpenElec? Is it powerful enough to decode 1080p on the CPU?

-Alternatively, does HW decoding work with these low-end Intel GPUs?

I have a Windows 7 desktop with i3-530 and I can play 1080p just fine in XBMC using software decoding. Actually I am encoding videos right now with my cores at 100% and when I opened up XBMC and played a 1080p rip in software it plays perfect! But that is Windows so I am not sure about Linux/OpenElec.

Thanks for any advice.

I don't think you'll be lucky with those two cpus. They only have HD-Graphic / GMA-HD with now HD-acceleration. So you wil end up arround 40% load when playing HD-content.

Not 'low-budget' but more futureproof would be an I3-2100. This CPU is the slowest with a HD 2000 wich comes with HD-hardware acceleration. For energysavings you should look out for the T-series (I3-2100T etc).

I just bought a Celeron G530, and am running openelec on it. I plan on getting a discrete GPU, but it has been running XBMC fine so far, can stream 1080p perfectly haven't used it for too long though. Don't know if intel+linux has hardware decoding

By going this route you are making life more complicated and swapping off the shelf "just works" convenience now for a possible future speed boost.

What i reckon will happen is you will have a less clean experience now and by the time you need more power the kit will be old hat anyway.

I totally see why you are doing it and we need trailblazers to buy and test more rare kit but expect to hit a few quirks until we all iron them out.

This is why people buy IONs for this purpose. Buy, stick in a USB key, install, 180 seconds later it just works.

I figured if I ran into too many problems, I could just run XBMC from ubuntu, but so far the Generic Build has been fine. Though I'd like to run 64-bit to take advantage of all 4GB of RAM, but I'm not sure the box even needs that much.

I researched the lower end Sandy Bridge processors on XBMC forums and many people recommended them, the G530 has enough power for 1080p, the only setup/configuration I had to do was for audio on my motherboard and this thread solved it:

wow - I'm surprised about the G350 - very interesting

About the RAM - My XBMC is runing on 4Gig. If i had to rebuild it today, I would go for 2Gig as I have never seen more than 30% of RAM-usage so far.