New HTPC Build - Moneual Moncaso 312

Hi all,

OK, so building my second HTPC. My first was just mostly experimentation, getting to know the hardware and making some dumb mistakes along the way. =) But I had fun.

Now, I'm ready to do it again. The only hard limitation is that I want to use the Moneual Moncaso 312 case, I'm absolutely sold on its looks. No real budget to speak of, but nothing too crazy either. I would, however, like a few recommendations :

1. Motherboard/chipset. I am still not even sure if I should go i3, AMD X2 or even Atom/Ion! This will be for living room duty, on a 2.1 system, so I'm not too concerned about HD audio bitstreaming. I only intend to run XBMC, surf the internet and rip Blu-Ray's/DVD's using MakeMKV (no encoding, straight to MKV). Right now, I am actually leaning towards the passively-cooled Asus Atom/Ion or Atom/Ion2 boards;

2. Further to that, what is the current status with the "Intel Bug"? Honestly, i3 is kind of last in my list due to some known issues (green-ish images) with some of the MPC:HC filters, and now this Intel bug thing (framerate jutter, is it?). Have those been addressed? Plus, it's a lot of money, and a lot of power I won't need;

3. Power supply. Thing is, I'd like to run a 40G SSD for the system (not decided yet on W7 or Linux, kind of leaning towards XBMCLive, so another plus for the Ion platform, although I've never worked with Linux before and I'm a bit scared), and TWO additional 2 TB drives. Later, I might build a file server with all those drives and only run the HTPC with the SSD, but that's later. So - I was thinking PicoPSU.....? Would that work with three hard drives? That'd be about all, really;

4. There's some known issues with the Moncaso 312 IR sensor (not RC6 compatible). I remember that I had very little trouble configuring a generic MCE remote to work with XBMC with a simple RegEdit file plucked from the forums. (I hear Dharma now has MCE remote support built-in, I was working with the Beta on my previous build - the DSPlayer version, actually....). Would you know if there would be a way to just plug in a regular, RC6 sensor? Another option, I know, would be to buy another generic remote, not connect the built-in sensor, and just use the remote's USB IR sensor, but I'd like an elegant solution where the sensor is hidden, just like in the case. Any options?

5. You guys think I'd need case fans if I used a passively-cooled platform?

That's about it. If you have any more suggestions, shoot them this way! Thanks in advance!