Alright guys, you've all been very helpful to me in the past. I had a very successful gaming PC build a little over a year ago, and now I'm wanting to do a media PC build. I'll dig more into researching some of the must have parts but looking for some expertise on this. Obviously gonna have to put in a strong graphics card and audio. Luckily I already have a good tv and great surround sound to back it up.
Some parts recommendations would be extremely helpful-doesn't need to be super cheap probably could drop around $600 total
What you need depends a lot on what you want to do with it.
1. If its in your living room it should be very quiet
2. If you want to game youll need an adequate cpu, a strong gpu and at least 4 gb ram. If you want to game in 3d you should probably get an Nvidia card. If you want to game in 4k you will have to get used parts or really crank down your settings in most newer AAA titles.
4. Do you want it to stream games?--> It should have an ethernet port and at least an O.K. CPU.
3. Do you want to hide it?-->Make it small enough.
4. Do you not want to hide it?-->Make it look nice enough for your living room.
5. Do you want it play blurays? thats an additional 40-50$ or so.
6. Do you want it to play TV?
7. How much storage do you need?
8. Do you want to switch it on/off remotely?
9. Is it supposed to be on standby constantly or do you just want to switch it on every time?.
I highly suggest going through the list of questions Rolling Potatoe posted. It sounds like you want to to have a lightweight gaming center in the living room as well but I'd rather be certain than speculative. A basic media center in my experience doesn't need a whole lot. I was gifted an old Dell Vostro 200 Slim, aside from buying a low profile graphics card to have dvi and hdmi output, it works steller as is with XBMCbuntu and rarely does it ever need to use more than 1.5GB or push the dinky dual core cpu past 50% with 1080.