"I've had a computer hooked up to my television for as long as I've had a living room. What would eventually be called a home theater PC had humble beginnings, starting its life tasked with simply playing movies and MP3s before eventually morphing into a personal video recorder and an occasional game box. Before long, living room gaming duties were offloaded to consoles, allowing years to pass with nary an upgrade to my media PC. So long has it been since I last cracked the case that a thin blanket of dust has draped itself across the system's internals, making the now-vintage hardware look all the more old and decrepit.

The HTPC market has exploded since I last built one. What was once an expensive accessory confined to enterprising geeks and do-it-yourself enthusiasts has moved into mainstream living rooms. And thanks to the relatively modest requirements of multimedia playback and recording, even today's budget hardware is up to the task—hardware like AMD's new 780G integrated graphics chipset.

The latest fruit borne of AMD's purchase of ATI packs a DirectX 10-complaint graphics core pulled from a Radeon HD 2400 graphics card, decode acceleration for HD DVD Blu-ray movie playback, second-generation PCI Express, Hybrid CrossFire, a new SB700 south bridge, and a Phenom-ready HyperTransport 3 processor link. All that's coming to motherboards that should cost less than $100. Alongside it, AMD is introducing a new energy-efficient Athlon X2 4850e with a 45W TDP and $89 price tag.

On paper, it looks like we have the recipe for a killer home theater PC or mainstream desktop. But has AMD nailed the execution this time around? We've run the 780G and 4850e through a grueling array of tests in order to find out. "