Advice on combination HTPC and Steam Box

Budget:
roughly $1000 - $1500. Can go higher if definitely necessary.

Expectations:
- A system that should at least keep up with the next-gen consoles. - I am primarily a Steam gamer (some GoG fun) and would like to use this as my Steam Box hooked to a newer 46" 1080p TV.
- The Bolt form factor is one of the candidates.
- I'm rather assuming that 16gb ram would reasonably future proof the system against the optimized methods the consoles use in their systems.
- Already have wireless 360 controller and MK70 Logitech keyboard and mouse. I'm soliciting other ideas for comfortable living room control, but they are not part of the budget.

Usage:
- Living room HTPC machine running XBMC or Plex
- Watching disc and streaming movies in HD
- Light computing
- Heavy gaming, mostly via Steam. Assume primarily RPGs and strategy titles. Very big fan of Bethesda's offerings including fan mods.

Special Needs:
- [Mostly Optional] System should lie flat and be less than 150mm.
- [Optional] Not offered by Digital Storm as far as I know, but if there is a good solution to remote power-on (IR remote essentially) in a small form factor and that doesn't take up precious controller/keybaord/mouse USB space, I'm all ears. Otherwise, not entirely too critical.
- [Optional] It's not impossible that I might try and boot a Hackintosh. I've specced out one or two mini-ITX builds on Amazon that the Customac site thinks will work well (they like the GA-Z87N-WIFI). The Bolt form factor looks far far better than what I could build myself, though. And this is increasingly an idle thought. My main wish would be the ability to boot Linux Mint and have reasonable driver support.


Saved Ticket #: n/a

Specifications:
- Definitely looking for Haswell architecture. I generally prefer nVidia GPUs since dual-booting
- I have an older 1TB WD Caviar Green HDD (WD10EADS). Is this a reasonable secondary drive?


Thanks for your help.

Bedwyr

Hi Bedwyr...  I haven't been ignoring you    I just have no idea what you need.  We did have a similar question awhile back and a DS employee did respond that  a lot of customers have been ordering the Bolt for HTPC and Steam Big Picture Mode.    They did add the stand to lay it flat just for the purpose of placing on a shelf or within a entertainment unit.

Edited by bprat22 - 25 Nov 2013 at 10:14am

Oh no problem at all. I just wanted to throw all of my mixed ideas into the configuration choice. I'm pretty sure I'll be running Steam through an XBMC overlay at boot (or something simpler if friends have trouble with XBMC).

One of my concerns is that the PS4 and XBOne both have 8gb ram but pipe it in certain advantageous ways that developers will take advantage of in coming years. Maintaining, say, 30-40 fps avg during this time would be optimal.

So would it be worth backing off 16gb and upgrading the 650 ti?

The weird special needs are absolutely nice-to-haves and not need-to-haves. I simply have a copy of Snow Leopard sitting on my shelf and it might be fun to see if I can get Mavericks running on the system. Likewise I've seen a few power-on solutions around but none that truly integrate with a universal remote. It's not a big deal.

Too bad you couldn't fit in a larger case.  The Vanquish 4 for $350 less, would give you the same Haswell chip, oc'd, the better gtx 770 over even the gtx 760, but a smaller SSD.  The Vanquish 4 is a lot of gaming for the money.   Just a thought in case any space frees up. 

Thanks.  I'm gonna read up on that later.  Might have to learn something today.   

Totally forgot to ask: Do you get both OS activation key and the media with your purchase?

Ok, I got one more question and this one is for dual-booters.

What would be a good and safe configuration for dual-booting Linux with Win8? The issue I'm thinking of would be primarily the Linux swap partition and the potential for SSD thrashing once system memory is under a peak load. I could stick with 16GB in ram combined with a single SSD and the OS will likely rarely use swap or I could stick with 8GB and a combination of drives, placing the swap partition on HDD. Any preference for people who dual boot?

Thank you.