Eh, I did my HTPC for $600 two years ago and it can do all of the above perfectly. Your Radeon IGP might decode h.264 in hardware faster than your 9600GT, but the 9600GT results are still perfectly acceptable. I don't care how fast it does it as long as it's at least 30 fps and as you say the gaming performance is far superior. Anything with DVI can do HDMI with the appropriate cable from Monoprice.

OCZ has been great to Icrontic, but honestly for an HTPC build you have no business overclocking. Any decent RAM will do; if you're spending over $70 w/o rebates for 4 GB you're doing it wrong.

In the interest of full disclosure, that $600 figure is a little misleading; it helps to have access to a well-stocked Goodwill. I picked up my Logitech Harmony 510 and bt8x8 TV tuner there for like $20 total. Yeah, mine can't do Blu-Ray yet or tune ATSC over-the-air, but those features are coming.

Why spend close to $300 on a green 2TB hard drive when you chose a high-wattage quad core processor? Seagate desktop 2TB 7200.12 drives were $160 at Frys last weekend, have a better warranty, and have a design power of like 9W which you're not going to notice with that space heater you've got mounted on your motherboard.

I would also argue that Mythbuntu or XP with MediaPortal are still solid OS choices.

To me, this looks like $250 short of a pretty decent desktop gaming machine.

-drasnor