At last there's a chipset out that can do a decent job with graphics, in ITX format, with the Atom! I'm sorely tempted to get one and have another go with at a HTPC to run my media.

Scan have one for just a little over £100.

That, plus a decent itx case, and your most of the way there!

The Atom N230 is a little underpowered, but it suffices for light media duties including HD playback as long as it can be hardware decoded. The dual core N330 has more grunt but in Ion configuration starts at £160, at this price a Core 2 ITX motherboard & CPU combo becomes competitive.

The case I'm not so sure about, having owned a similar case and power supply the 40mm fan isn't going to be quiet. I like the look of the Antec ISK-300 ITX case, it includes a 65W passive PSU that is perfect for Atom machines but under powered for Core 2, AM2 etc

Oh snap!

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/161260#

That looks quite tidy, what about watching blueray movies?

An external USB blu-ray drive would do nicely.

Shame that, as it would look nicely if you had all in the box or at least space to mount one or at the very least mount a lappy blueray drive or lappy slot drive, it would tidy this up quite nicely.

Isn't the 230 the dual core? I thought that was fine for regular use, especially with a decent gfx/chipset.

The N230 is single core for sure, but it has HT. Google around for benchmarks and you'll find it struggles in some CPU intensive tasks, I wouldn't recommend it for a general purpose HTPC where it does more than play media.

Oh, so 2 = single core, 3 = dual core... sort it out Intel

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3630&p=11

Check it out, with XBMC looks pretty sweet.
Also note that Win-7 apparantly runs really well on the Atom.

Atom is just an die shrink of p4 with HT, so abit weak on the performance side, but the ion gpu is great for watching vids, n internet browsing, as i tested my mates netbook, but weak in all other areas, i recommend using either linux or xp due to weak cpu.