HTPC Face Off: VIA EPIA to the rescue?

After much thought, a few arguments and an extreme Guitar Hero play off complete with power slides, we decided to pit the EPIA EX motherboard, against a home theatre PC (HTPC) system you could actually buy for around the same price. We came up with an AMD 690G system, based on the MSI K9AGM2 motherboard and one of AMD’s new low power Athlon X2 BE-2350 CPUs. It’s a slightly bigger form factor at micro-ATX and it has a smaller variety of features, but it still comes with HDMI and supports protected content needed for much of the "next generation" High-Definition media.