Depends how you want to use it. Some people stream their media to their home theatre from their primary desktop. If that's what you were looking to do, you would probably be better off with a smaller and lower power consumption device.
I'm personally the other way around, I have a proper HTPC with a heap of storage for my media.
I have this connected directly to the home theatre and also stream media from it to other devices.
If you have the money to do it this way, it's what I think makes the most sense. It would be silly to run my primary desktop, with an overclocked quad core and two graphics cards, whenever I want to stream media to something. Horribly power inefficient!
With an under-volted C2D and a 5570, it has quite low power consumption so I leave my HTPC running almost 24/7. This system will soon be scrapped for something with a new dual core and I'll just use IGP.
Anyway, if I was in your position, I would add a reasonable amount of RAM, an SSD, low power GPU with HDMI, install Win 7 or 8 and load it up with some high capacity hard drives.
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