Heh, unfortunately I am one of those guys with a faster machine - with specialty heatsinks and fans and PSU's to eliminate noise. The reason I need the speed is for various filters provided by FFDShow which can be CPU intensive (resize, denoise, asharp, etc).
The problem that a lot of those guys have with the all-in-one solutions is the quality of such components, ie onboard video vs Radeon R300 core for a 10bit DAC. Onboard sound which resamples everything to 48khz vs say an M-Audio board which outputs at native sample rate, stability of misc drivers and apps on some of the misc chipsets (specifically the Via chipsets seem to give ppl hell, lot of initial problems with Via chipsets and the H3D)
Eh, I say if it works and your happy stick with what you have. I tried onboard video for a bit (Intel 845g chipset) and I didnt like it compared to the Radeon cores. Sound, I am still personally on the fence, currently I just use SPDIF out for DVD's out of the computer as my Audigy resamples anything else. I may look at the M-Audio Revolution later once the drivers mature a bit to see how the DACs compare.
Sidenote, I will probably build another HTPC from one of those shuttles boxes for my father, he is currently using an old machine that used a older Dxr2 for quite a while, it has a Xcard in it now (component out of the card vs jacking with transcoders on vga) but he wants to play some of the newer games so needs a little more speed.
-pd
