Picked up a refurbGateway slim tower with H61 sandy bridge @2.4ghz celeron 4gb ram 7200rpm500gb HD for 209$!!! 350$ anywhere else.
Needed to replace my old am2 1.5ghz dual core HD zino HTPC that is dying with HW blue screens.
Picked up a low profile silent HIS 6450 for 44$ was goin to return it if the HD2000 IGP was good enough...but it was a little flaky.The AMD 6450 works fantastic as a HTPC card,since they only use 20 watts total on furmark i am pretty sure the little 220watt psu will be fine.The PSU is on the bottom so the pcie16 6450 passive card is mounted inside the system all the way on the top.The Slim case has a lot of vent holes on top right above the video card along with a decent decent sized side panel grill.It has a intel style heatsink with a air scoop to get closer to the side panel grill.The fan has a AVC sticker on the middle of the 80mm estimated fan blades and never runs above 1050rpm and is silent.Unless i turn off smart fan in bios,then it rips at 4000+rpm and is very loud.
The HIS passive 6450 does run a bit hot 55 c idle and 67 playing a uncompressed bluray stream.The cpu seems to stay between 31c idle and 39c loaded.The chipset hits 50+C si i think i am goin to add a silent slim 80mm intake fan just to help cool chipset and video card.Just need a 4 pin fan or a adapter for MB.
Its a speed demon surfs web and everything HTPC wise i think almost as fast as my 2600k rig.Plus it stays at 1600mhz just like my 2600k until loaded.I Guess you cant make a slow sandy bridge even with only 2mb l2 cache.Once i disabled the IGP it got faster.I take that is from not having to share its small cache between cpu and gpu.
Best 260 dollar pc i ever used.I think intel has got the low end cpu war won since that G530 sandy based celeron is only 50$.I am very impressed/happy.