Hardware best mini pc for home entertainment and emulators

[kiel379]

Hey guys.
So I have been looking on ebay at the thousands of different android mini pc's both stand alone and dongle types. I have seen quad core, duel core and varying amounts of ram. My question is out of all of these different bits of tech mostly from shady sounding Chinese sellers what should I be looking for?

I have found some with 1.8 ghz quad core processors and 2 gb of ram and they look the most promising to me but I want to make sure I get the most out of it. Steaming and emulators are what I wanted it for so do I need to look at any gpu things?
What do you recommend guys?

 

[Super.Nova]

I recommend the OUYA since it's most known and probably most compatible with games.
It fits the bill just fine, price is well within reach and, although it's 2 generations old, it's powerful enough to play most Android and emulators games plus the video playback.

 

[kiel379]

I looked into those but it's a bit to game focused for what I need it for. Games are only a part of what I wanted one for. I was hoping to have xbmc on it to stream shows and stuff. I already have a moga pocket and a track pad and keyboard for any game needs I heard that some have dedicated gpu's and some don't. I don't know if that makes much of a difference though.

 

[trumpet-205]

You can root Ouya. That'll allow you to install XMBC.

 

[ResleyZ]

What kind of systems do you want to emulate? I use my laptop for emulation (8GB RAM, I5-2450m 2.5-3.1 GHz quad-core processor, AMD Radeon HD 7670M) and it plays nearly every emulator I could think of, including PSP, PS2, Wii, Gamecube, all at nearly full speed. If you could look at the emulators you want, and write down which hardware they require you can easily make a list of minimum hardware that you want. That makes it much easier to narrow down the sort of PC you want. I would not recommend the OUYA, or any other Android device, because some emulators are kinda buggy, or aren't very user friendly.

 

[Dhampir]

I personally have used just a basic Atom "nettop" before as my home theatre PC. It was perfect for everything up to PSX and N64 and was about on par with the specs you described in the OP. Here's a link to Newegg.com's nettop section.