Thoughts on Shuttle XH61

[cronos]

I wonder what you guys think about this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856101125

It's currently on sale at Newegg for $179 with a bonus of free OCZ Agility 3 60GB SSD.

This takes care of the case, motherboard, and power supply (external), so all I need is a cpu (thinking maybe i3 21xx?) and a set of RAM and I'm good to go for probably a little over $300.

The reviews I have read are actually very decent. It also has a 3-year warranty from Shuttle.

This seems to fit my needs for simple, small, quiet HTPC. I would run XBMCBuntu on it, with all the media currently stored on a network drive (a hacked pogoplug running as a fileserver).

Can I get close to this (~$300) by picking out different parts with a budget-minded mini-ITX system with similar features?

 

[RU482]

I've got a Shuttle box with a 1st Gen i5 and a low-mid range video card that I bought about 2 yrs ago. Never had a problem. It was a decent gamer for what it was, gave it to my son when I built my most recent rig

 

[cronos]

My experience with Shuttle barebones is that they're very hit or miss. I don't personally own one but I supported quite a bit of of them at work over the past 7 years or so. While they're mostly fine, when something goes wrong it's a big pain because it's not some component that you can just easily replace by yourself.