My Media Center PC

As my faithful readers already know, I am in the process of assembling a Media Center PC. I am nearing completion of this endeavor, and I must say, the experience has been quite rewarding endeavor (uh... no, not really).

It took me about two weeks to gather all the parts and a few non-sequential hours to assemble the system

Here is a list of components that make up the system:

Motherboard: ECS KT600-A
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500+
Memory: Generic 512MB RAM
Hard Drive: Western Digital 250GB EIDE
Optical Drive: NEC 8X Black Dual Layer DVD+/-RW Drive
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon 9600Pro 256MB
Input Devices: Gyration Media Center Remote & Keyboard
Case: SilverStone SST-LC03

I am still waiting on one thing to arrive. It's the DVI-HDTV converter from ATI. I placed the order with them over two weeks ago, and they "lost" my order. I called them yesterday to find out what was taking so long, and they couldn't find my order in their system. I am somewhat sympathetic since I work in the e-Commerce area, however it is quite unacceptable to lose an order. They quickly created a new order, and gave me free shipping, so I suppose that will have to suffice.

After building the system, I was anxious to connect it to my aging 55" Toshiba rear-projection TV. After dragging it all out into my living room and connecting it, I was disappointed with it in a few areas:

1. The S-Video out on the video card is wickedly "noisy". The picture as it appears on my TV is not at all clear. Based on the "frequency" of the noise, I think it must be one of the four fans in my system generating some EM interference that is being picked up by the video card and sent to my TV with the actual signal. In trying to diagnose the source of the noise, I unplugged the case ventilation fan and the video card fan. Neither was the culprit. I haven't tried unplugging the CPU fan, and the other fan is inside the power supply. I can't really unplug the CPU fan (or maybe I could... just for a second) and I can't turn off the power supply for obvious reasons, so I am not sure what to do next. I am not overly concerned just yet because I am not expecting this noise to be an issue through the DVI output. When my converter arrives from ATI, I'm expecting the picture to become much better. However, if the noise somehow jumps across this D/A conversion and shows up on the TV, then I'll be getting a new video card.


2. Noise of a different type. The system is too darned loud. The loudest fan is the case ventilation fan. The other fans aren't too bad, and the power supply is very quiet. I think I'll try disconnecting the ventilation fan and just monitor the CPU temperature for a while. If it rises too much, I'll have to replace this fan with something much quieter. Hopefully there is enough airflow in the case and I won't need a fan at all. But, I'm expecting it to get rather warm in there, so I'll probably need something else.


3. The Gyration mouse and keyboard is disappointing. If you're not familiar with this technology, it really is pretty cool - however there are aspects of the suite that disappointed me. You basically control the cursor simply by moving your hand - no wires, no desktop required. That part of the mouse works well and I'm happy with it. However, the mouse is touted as a Media Center mouse/remote control. It has a few buttons that are supposed to integrate with Media Center and control certain Media Center functions using buttons and "Swipes" (this is where you make a quick gesture with the mouse in mid-air and it will do something specific - like go to live TV). The buttons are very difficult to use without accidentally clicking other buttons on the mouse. This causes weird things to happen, depending on what combination of buttons you accidentally pushed. The "swipe" thing is just stupid. I really wanted it to work since it could essentially add 8 or more "buttons" to the mouse to do different things without needing the keyboard. However, at the time of this writing, I just can't get the hang of it and I will probably give up on the "swipes".

Despite my negative comments, there are many good things about this system. From a performance perspective, it is more than sufficient. I don't have time to play many games, but I tried out Tomb Raider 2 (since it came with the sound card), and it ran just fine. I will certainly try out a few more once I get the DVI converter, because right now I can't watch it for any significant length of time before my eyes start bugging out of my head because of the noise in the display.

I've also been ripping all my CDs into WMA format. Usually, the system can rip an entire CD in under 3 minutes. Since the CPU utilization stays relative low (<30%) during the ripping process, I assume the bottle neck is in the rate at which the data can be transferred from the drive. I've been asked why WMA and not MP3? There are a couple of reasons really - WMA is a superior compression algorithm (audio quality to file size ratio), and I don't use any devices that require the MP3 format (well, my wife's car has MP3 decoding built-in, but we've yet to use it). So far, I've ripped about 140 of my approximately 400 CDs.

Enough for this post... it's been sitting here in draft mode for over a week. I have some updates to write, but I'll do it in a separate post.