The Windows XP Expert Zone has published some interesting articles in the past few months. I paid special attention to Terri Stratton’s article, Should you build or buy a new Media Center PC?, as I went through the same decision process last year.
She put together two systems, one based on an AMD CPU, the other built around an Intel chip. The price tags came back at nosebleed levels – the cheapest AMD system was $2365 plus $146 for a tuner card, for a total of $2511. The priciest system (AMD-based, surprisingly) was $3118.
Those numbers are insane. Part of the problem is that Terri insisted on using parts that deliver far more performance than a Media Center PC demands. You don’t need a 3.6GHz P4 560 CPU (at $475-775, depending on how smart a shopper you are) when a 3GHz 530 will do the trick for under $200. Likewise, an ATI Radeon XT850XT Platinum at $500 or more is overkill. You shouldn’t need to spend more than $150 on a video card that will deliver excellent performance on every common Media Center task. Scaling back on those two components alone saves somewhere around $700.
In fact, the components in this system will generally run hot and loud, which is exactly what you don’t want in your living room. The referenced systems might be awesome for gaming, but they’re not well matched for a Media Center.
If you’re planning to put together a Media Center PC, think outside the high-performance box. Consider a smaller form factor, with a CPU and graphics card that don’t need noisy fans. The Shuttle small-form-factor system I built last year is still going strong, and you could build one just like it for less than half what this article recommends.
Of course the assumption is made here that you need the PC in your living room. My next Media Center PC will actually be a super performance one that sits in my home office. When doing big photoshop or video editing, that power will be handy to keep around. Not necessary for a MCE machine but nice for a home office machine that will moonlight through extender technology as my MCE machine. I’m planing the next go around to have no PC in my living room but to instead run it all with the new Xbox 360 leaving a new high end PC where it belongs in my home office.
For a dedicated HTPC, cool’n'quiet is definitely the way, and for that you should really be thinking Pentium M; as well as requiring minimal cooling requirements, the Pentium M is also very frugal on how much power it draws when idling, rather important if you’re going to leave your HTPC on 24×7 to record all those channels.
Ditto for graphics cards; as the article suggests, you don’t need anything more powerful than a DirectX 9 card, you can get a passively-cooled (note the lack of noisy fans again?) 6600 for a pittance these days, and it’ll still churn out some decent framerates if you insist on playing games on your TV.
In other words, if you think about it, and aren’t building the system on your employmer’s budget, you can easily do it for half of what they claim above.
Honestly, I think she should have scaled back the processor and the video card (as mentioned in the post) and added more RAM. 1GB of RAM is alot, but for a gamer, thats not much. 2GB of RAM or a single 1GB stick of RAM so you can upgrade to 2GB at a later date may have been a much better idea. While cheep would be a good idea at the time, upgradeability is also important.
I’ve running MCE on a dual HD tuner box, Athlon64 3000+, 512MB RAM, and a slightly older Radeon 9600PRO. All that is stuffed into an Antec Overture II with slow moving fans to keep it quiet and put in a cabinet with the airflow out the back, hence muffling sound out the front (I also have an IR distribution system to deal with the enclosed nature of the cabinet). It all runs like a charm and cost less than $1000.
Jeff, which IR distributuon system do you use?