Are they chocolate?
Looks like a nice rig.
The Prescott though will run hot even if it is idling, doesn't seem to be that much of an issue though, they're designed that way, the downside to this though is that the internal components tend to run hot. My prescott idles at 50 degrees and tops out ay 75!! The motherboard is rarely below 40. My Northwood/motherboard is 20 degrees cooler. Whether that means the components will last longer with the cooler board I don't know, but it makes sense to me.
I haven't had a lot to do with the Nova-T's and MCE, I know they're a nice card but they are less frequently used with MCE due to them only recently being shipped with BDA drivers (as far as I know).
My biggest concern with HTPC is noise. There's no such thing as a silent PC but you want to get as close as possible.
Specifically I'd check into the noise of the GPU fan, the cooling method you intend to use for the CPU. The power supply noise level (though this one may be silent, hard to tell without looking it up), and finally the case fans (SilenX have some nice quiet ones).
Next to that I'd see if you can find out a bit about the Asus board and behaviour with MCE, most (older) Asus boards have not worked correctly with S3 Resume from standby, though you can get around it by using hibernate. If you're buying new kit though you want it to work out of the box so to speak. If you're lucky you'll find someone with that board that can give you advice.
The PC you've specced there is very high end for simple TV watching and recording. Many people buy top of the line and only use 20% of the power. Check to make sure that the items you list are the best bang for buck price wise. I run a Northwood 2.66Ghz cpu and can record on 2 channels and watch a previous recording simultaneously without issue.
That may change when it's all HD but even so my CPU runs at < 30% when recording HD on a single tuner due to the dxva video assist the gfx card provides. In addition to that there's pretty much no chance of a HD fix for Australia happening until MCE 2006 which apparently only runs on Longhorn. From past experience an OS upgrade of that magnitude has always required a change in hardware. The point being is that maybe a lower specced machine (thus cheaper), would do the job for now and you can upgrade later to a better specced machine when more is known about the new version of MCE. Trying to go future proof with PC's is a hard thing to do.
At any rate what you have specced there is one nice piece of machinery. Hopefully I've given you a few more things to consider in the quest for the perfect HTPC!
Cheers,
Arkay.
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