Recommendation for HTPC

I have spotted two systems as follows:

System-A

i5-3210M / 4GB RAM / 1 TB HDD 5400 rpm / HD 4000

System-B

i3-3217U / 8GB RAM / 1 TB HDD 5400 rpm / HD 4000

The price difference between A and B is very small. A is about USD 77 more expensive than B.

Both have the small form factor.

Which one is the best suited as HTPC from performance point of view?

The I5 will always outperform an I3 and ram is cheap to upgrade if you need more, that being said though even the I5 you have listed there is nothing special in performance statistics.

You ask about performance in relation to a Home Theatre PC, but surely the point of a Home Theatre PC is discrete (quiet) media handling.

I wouldn’t have thought performance is really isn’t going to be an issue (and either should be able to handle it) unless you are going to be using it for other tasks other than just a Home Theatre PC.

Given that a Home Theatre PC is going to be serving up media, films, etc. I would have though its graphics capabilities would have been of greater importance. Unless they have a discrete graphics card (not in your specs) then it depends on what the on board graphics is and that is in the CPU.

I don’t know if there is a different (better) Intel graphics in the i5 to the i3, that is something that you would have to check against a more detailed system specification or search Intel for details on the CPU version specification.

David both systems have the Intel HD4000 graphics which should be fine for HT use but the I5 is still only a dual core pushing 3.10Ghz in turbo mode so the processing power isnt that great, a higher end I5 would be better imo.
The lower end cpu would be fine if there were dedicated graphics ( Nvidia etc ) the modern cards are all 700 series now and they have enough grunt to be able to get away with a lower end cpu.

Yes, for the most part HTPCs don’t have to be speed freaks, essentially handle media tasks but given a choice the i5 would be the one. But as I mentioned it rather depends on what the OP intends for this HTPC.