I've decided to bite the bullet and have a 3rd crack at building a simple HTPC. Given I first tried this a decade ago, with another stab at it about 5 years later. I never really found a solution I was truly happy with. So, given it's now 2013, I think technology has moved on sufficiently to allow me have a 3rd crack at it. It needs to do three things: I want something that will run MythTV and/or XBMC, allow me to access Netflix and run Skype.

Originally I wanted use a Raspberry Pi, which ticked only the XBMC box. MythTV doesn't currently take advantage of the GPU acceleration, which leaves only CPU decoding, which won't really pass muster. There's also no ARM binaries for Skype Desktop and the Netflix on linux hack needs Wine, so it's therefore x86 only.

I've settled on a SFF barebones box from Zotac and found two boxes that seem to fit. However, I'm unsure which is going to suit me best. I'm looking at their ID41 and 84 boxes. Both have Intel Atom CPU's at ~ 1.8GHz, but one has an ION2 graphics chipset and the other has a GeForce 520M. The prices are within £15 of each other.

I'm so out of date when it comes to stuff like this, so, given 3D performance is largely irrelevant, but decoding 1080p MPEG2 and H.264 content is crucial. Which one would you buy?