At the moment I'm testing Steams Streaming from the desktop to a laptop which is hooked up to the TV. And I'm very pleased with the streaming, however tying up the laptop isn't ideal.
So I'm looking at getting a mini PC, like a NUC or AMD Sapphire, to take over the client side. There's lots out there but I'm just not sure what I really should be looking for. Would an i3 be good enough, there's also graphics, would Intel HD Graphics 5000 be plenty.
So apart from being able to cope with Steam Streaming it also has to be able to play back HD content from my home server and other then music and web surfing it won't be tasked much.
Mate, at the moment steam's streaming is not an acceptable way to play. Although if valve do patch it and smooth it out i know what you could do. So the main aspect i would care about for this streaming PC is the things your gaming PC doesn't have. So i would get a micro ITX board with a cheap AMD APU, i would put a disk drive, a Good sound card and most importantly a good Gigabit internet card. Not wireless but a wired lan card that can take 2 Ethernet cables, i would recommend to put this on your main PC too. Because the biggest problem with this service right now is latency. Happy to help :D