Having gone away to Apple TV land for a while, I want to return to OpenElec

Things have changed a little since my Acer Revo 3600 days, so which is perceived best way to go now?

Looking at Acer 3700 or RL70 - but which CPU/build is now perceived to be most stable.

Might still consider Zotac barebones but again would appreciate knowing the best budget hardware

I have a Zotac Nano AD10 running OpenELEC from a USB Flash Drive so far so good on that one. I also have a Revo 3700 running OpenELEC from a 16GB SSD, that one too so far so good.

Right now I'm trying to bring up a Foxconn nT-i1500 with OpenELEC and having problems. It has the latest Atom processor but an Intel GMA 3600 graphics adapter. The software installs but won't boot up. Gets stuck on the OpenELEC splash screen. Hopefully will get this worked out so I can get it installed in our living room.

I faced this very question very recently.All things considered I decided to go AMD fusion.
My 1st AMD based pc for many years!

I went for a Zotac zbox AD04 after looking into building myself only to find that if I wanted a discrete sized unit the price wasnt so far away from this prebuilt unit.

I have to say it couldnt of been easier. Adding the ram and hard drive to the unit was a 2 minute job and totally tool free!

I added OpenElec beta 3 (my 1st ever OpenElec) with ease and the only config to make it work fully was setting Audio to HDMI.

The unit is working perfectly so far and ive pretty much tried out everything xbmc can do.
All types of plugins and getting it to play all my media files.
It hasnt skipped a frame on any 1080p video either, streamed from the net or via my USB external drive connected to the USB 3.