For a media center, Raspberry Pi is great since it has hardware video decoding in GPU. The menus in XBMC use the CPU, so they are a bit sloppy, but overclocking

For a media center, Raspberry Pi is great since it has hardware video decoding in GPU. The menus in XBMC use the CPU, so they are a bit sloppy, but overclocking it a bit is reported to help. Mali (A20's GPU) has no driver for hardware-accelerated decoding, so it's going to decode video on CPU, and will likely be even slower than RPi. Other boards, I'm not really know but XBMC site has a list of recommended hardware. On x86 front, if size matters, you can take a look at this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135368 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135... ($32 after rebate). It needs a stick of alaptop RAM and a laptop power brick. You can load XBMC from a USB stick. If size doesn't matter, look for AM1 CPU/motherboard. CPU will run you $31 (http://www.amazon.com/AMD-Sempron-2650-1-45Ghz-AD2650JAHMBOX/dp/B00IOMFFYM http://www.amazon.com/AMD-Sempron-2650-1-45Ghz-AD2650JAHMBOX...) and motherboard, $34 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157489 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157...).