I don't need oomph here, nor the electricity consumption. I work from home, and there are 6 dual-CPU computers here, including a watercooled dual Xeon 2.8GHz w/ 2G DDR and a watercooled dual AMD MP 2600+ with 2G DDR (both with 10,000 rpm SCSI drives). There are 6 single-CPU machines too. My electricity bill would make most people ill, and the noise of the racks in the basement is definitely way beyond what any sane person would tolerate in a living space. The objective in the family room now is 'no fans, no water pumps'. i.e. silent but for disk drive fans. I have no interest in another DVD in the family room, since my standalone player works fine and I'm about to order a Denon 2900 to get SACD. No need for a tuner card either, I have cable, over-the-air HD, DirectTV HD, and a Replay 5000 in the family room. I do have a couple of WinTV cards elsewhere, and they work fine, you just have to be careful about cabling and card placement to avoid noise
(RG-59 is a bad idea in my office, for example; I needed good RG-6 to avoid induced noise). Video quality only has to be good enough to use my mp3 jukebox client, and I could actually live without any video since my tendency is to queue a bunch of stuff at once (which I can do from any computere in the house, including the laptops).
