I don't know about you but I love listening to music, watching movies, surfing the web, editing videos, importing pictures  and watching slideshows all at the same time. I guess I am alone.

:P

If you go single cpu then get at least a 1.4GHz+  A single 1GHz will play most video fine but will have problems with some HD stuff. 

this one would be perfect:  http://store.fastmac.com/product_info.php?products_id=14

here are all your options..  its all the upgrades compatible with a sawtooth 350.

http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/Upgrades...s=Show+Upgrades

HD video takes some serious juice.  Some apps will even farm out to the gpu to lighten the load on the cpu.  I would say if you want HD, go with a mini core duo.  By the time you upgrade the Sawtooth enough to do the job, the mini would be more cost effective.

I have been down this road with my Cube. I was looking to see if it was theoretically possible to run 1080p on a Cube with the right upgrades. RAM will help to an extent, but as has been mentioned the bottleneck is the CPU. Particularly its clock speed. A modest upgrade should allow you to play 720p without too much difficulty. My 1.33GHz PowerBook struggles a little with it though, and your bus is slower, so I would recommend 1.6GHz+ or a dual. My MDD Dual 1GHz is fine with 720p.

As for 1080p, you may as well forget it unless you want to spend big. I had a stack of Cube owners (at Cubeowner) test HD files on their pimped out Cubes, only one or two (literally one got anything like watchable 1080p, and they all had the top of the line, fastest you can buy CPU, maxxed RAM, and good GPUs too. I think this was a dual 1.7G4 or something like that. Your bus is faster than the Cubes, but not that much faster. I still think you are well into dual territory, don't think about going below 1.5 at the very least, and if you want to be sure, go for a dual 1.8 or whatever is the highest speed you can get. Don't worry too much about variations in cache. HD playback is all about clock speed.

oh i do plenty of multitasking on my main machine(s)... what i was saying was the purpose of the HTPC is more single task oriented.



i had taken a look at all thses options prior to my original post, IMHO most of these aren't worth the money.



I do already have a duo core mini, but wanted something alittle more expandable, in a little bit different package.



i think i remember seeing something about that over a cubeowner.com sometime somewhere. 2nd favorite site.

well looks as if my dreams of sawtooth supremacy have been shut down. oh well i can still easily get standart def use out of it. with all my dvds and music in one convenient place.

I know exactly what you mean!  I bought my dual 867 MDD a few months ago because I needed expandability and was using a G4 mini at the time.

May I suggest flashing a card it really expands your possibilities and the bang for the buck is much better. I myself have flashed a nvidia 5500 and an ATI X3 to a x800 thanks to strange dogs forums.