Zotac ZBOX-ID41-PLUS-U Intel NM10 2 x 204Pin SO-DIMM Next Generation NVIDIA ION (w/512MB DDR3 memory) Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System

Pros: It's small and doesn't really look out of place in the entertainment center. It is really quiet you can't even tell it is there.

Cons: It does run very hot sometimes and with no active cooling this can cause some problems. I have had it for a year now and about 2 months ago I got a S.M.A.R.T. hard drive error but never lost any data, but since all it does is run an Ubuntu and XBMC no harm was done.

Other Thoughts: It really works great for streaming media from the server to the living room TV. I would recommend anyone that is looking for a small box to run as an HTPC to pick this up.

Pros: Small, extremely quiet, plays 1080p video streamed from a NAS with xbmc (in either windows 8 or ubuntu 12.04) without any trouble. I bought this to be an htpc so streaming HD video was really my only big concern. Owner for a few months now and have had 0 problems with it (save for the one con I mention)

Cons: Optical Audio Out. I bought this system because it was one of very few small form factor, cheap(ish), low power, PC's with optical audio out. The problem I have here is that when playing video for more than about 20 minutes the optical audio will get out of sync with the video (trail behind by more and more) if I unplug and plug back in the optical cable it syncs right back up. I'm assuming this is due to a poor optical modulator with a VERY small buffer. I experienced this problem in both windows 8 and ubuntu 12.04 (by the way, the tiles of windows 8 may seem great for an HTPC, but it really isn't ubuntu's text looks far crisper and the whole experience is cleaner)

Other Thoughts: still trying to see if there's some way I can fix the buffer issue for optical with software, if I can I will update, but so far it seams to just be a problem with sub-par hardware in this case.

Pros: *Quiet
*Easy access to HDD and RAM
*Generous number of USB slots
*Has USB in Front, Top, and Back of the box
*E-sata, HDMI, & Optical

Using xbmc, plays back 1080p mkv content perfectly with no pauses. Good cheap htpc client, unless you want to use netflix, more later

Cons: USB 3.0 causes the OS to pause using the supplied drivers with Win 7 x64. A mouse plugged in to USB 3.0 slot also pauses. I Reloaded the box with Win 7 x32 and haven't loaded the USB 3.0 drivers yet and the box works perfectly. I will try to find drivers not causing this issue once I get the box imaged and I hope it can be resolved.

Cannot play netflix HD content and barely handled non-HD content. This is probably a silverlight issue as the box is trying to play it all back with the CPU even though Use Hardware Acceleration is checked in silverlight.

Pros: We use this to load linux and open a dedicated browser for a kiosk type system connected to a TV. supports full 1080p video decode. What more would you need from a kiosk system? Or your home system for that matter.

Cons: Wish the mount that connects to the back of a TV on the VESA mount would have some trick so that it would work with a wall mount + the TV. If you wall mount the TV then you can't VESA mount the unit anywhere.

Pros: My HTPC is the size of a WII. (Had an old ATX case before)
Optical SPIDF!!!
Quad core; 250GB HD; 2GB RAM default.
Mods to HD and Memory is stupidly simple.

Cons: Can't boot off USB 3.0 for Linux install.
BIOS splash screen is not user friendly. For example "Press F11 to change boot" does not display. Just got to know/guess.

Other Thoughts: This is my new Linux HTPC. Ubuntu 10.10 loaded flawlessly. Thought I was going to have to use a scaled version like lubuntu but this box could easily be a normal desktop computer. Serves as my Boxee/XMBC, Samba, MPC, and overall Media server for the household. Hard wired to my router so I am not using the wireless.
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So the "new" hard drive came with a foreign version of XP with Zotac test applications. Interesting to boot into and mess with.
Went ahead and formatted for the new Ubuntu install.

Pros: Price, I know some people may say it's high, but your getting a PC with decent power, 2G of memory and a 250G HD ready to go out of the box, with a bump to 4GB memory this could be my day to day desktop.
Size, nice tiny footprint.
Access, very easy to open to upgrade memory or HD (really the only reasons too open it), I have an ION 'nettop' from another Mfg. that's stupidly difficult to get open.

Cons: USB 3 ports - A lot of things just don't work right in USB3, took me quite a while before I realized the reason I couldn't get my MCE IR Receiver to work (even though Linux recognized it and loaded the module (driver)) was because it was connected to one of the USB3 ports.
Power light never goes 'OFF', on is green and off is red, that seems to be quite common these days but I find it annoying.

Other Thoughts: Picked this up to replace an aging mythtv frontend box that couldn't handle HD. Took a bit of tweaking to get everything right (Audio over HDMI etc.) but has handled everything I've thrown at it so far.
For some reason when I tried turning of the blue logo (ring) light in the bios, the power light would no longer switch from red to green to indicate the unit was on.