My new Media Center PC

This is my first post directly to the new Community Server 2007 platform for this website; previous blog entries from the old site will be migrated as I get the chance. So as it's a new platform I thought I'd do something I haven't done before and post a non-technical entry about the new Media Center PC I've just built to replace my old one, which died an untimely death.

A major problem with the old one was that it was noisy. Really noisy. When you turned it on it sounded like a hurricane blowing through the room. This time I did quite a bit more research, mainly on Silent PC Review, to get a good compromise between style, price and performance. Of course, it had to run Vista 64-bit, just because I haven't had a 64-bit computer to play with before. This is what I came up with:

• Antec NSK2400 case - this set the scene for the whole PC as it is a home theater case designed specifically with cooling and noise reduction in mind, utilising three seperate chambers (power supply, motherboard and hard disks) for isolation. It's cheap and looks fairly smart, however you are limited to MicroATX motherboards due to its internal partitioning.
• Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard - a decent Socket AM2 motherboard with FireWire and gigabit LAN onboard, as well as integrated graphics and sound which I wasn't intending to use. It supports AMD's Cool'n'Quiet technology which is nice, but only has 2 PCI slots which isn't.
• AMD Athlon 64 5200+ processor - as I said, it had to be 64-bit, and AMD really has the pedigree here. The processor has fairly low power consumption making heat dissipation easier (and thus quieter) while performing very well in all benchmarks. It's probably far faster than necessary but it's very reasonably priced, and was actually cheaper than the 4800+.
• Zalman 7500CU heatsink - nearly 1kg of copper heatsink with a large fan that can be slowed down to an inaudible level keeps the processor cool. I wanted to get a Scythe Ninja fully passive one, but unfortunately it's too tall for the case. This does the job nicely though, keeping the processor below 40 degrees at normal usage levels.
• Crucial DDR2 PC-6400 RAM - the motherboard supports RAM up to 800MHz so I had to use it. 2 x 1GB sticks of this fit in the motherboard in dual channel mode giving great performance for a relatively small amount of cash. There's still another two slots free should Vista require even more than this, and with a 64-bit machine I can address it all too!
• WD Raptor 74GB boot disk - To speed up boot and application load times I decided to go for the 10,000rpm Raptor disk which has incredibly fast seek and data transfer times, and is also fairly quiet. The difference it makes to overall system speed is really obvious and I'd recommend it to anyone.
• WD Caviar 500GB data disk - The boot disk is faily small, so a second larger, slower disk in the shape of the Caviar provides storage for all the music and recorded TV. This disk is specifically designed for low noise, making it ideal for a home theater PC.
• Gigabyte GeForce 7600GS graphics card - I recently acquired a 37" HDTV LCD television, so wanted a card with HD output. I intended to go for the one with the HDMI output rather than component, but I bought the wrong card by accident. However, one decent component video cable later and it looks great on the TV so no need for HDMI yet. The main reason for this card, apart from HDTV support, it that it's passively cooled and thus completely silent.
• SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS soundcard - this card was sitting in my old PC and while it's not exactly current or high-end, it sounds decent and there are Vista x64 drivers available for it.

Other than this I stuck a couple of DVD-RW drives in from the old PC - I like to have two drives set to regions 1 and 2 respectively so that there's no need to keep changing the region or using any hacks to reset it. Just use whichever drive is appropriate. This is quite useful for me as I have a lot of R1 DVDs from the old days when you couldn't really buy anything over here and had to import them.

The one thing you may have noticed missing is a TV tuner card. I do have a Black Gold digital one, but there are no Vista x64 drivers available yet. Rather than buying a new card I'm just going to wait as the TV has its own tuner built in so I just need to switch inputs. Slightly inconvenient, but I don't watch TV very often anyway so it's not really a big deal.

So what's the verdict? Well overall I'm very pleased with it.

The first thing I noticed is that it is incredibly fast. It boots from cold and loads media center in about 30 seconds, compared to well over a minute on the old PC. A lot of this is down to the 10,000rpm Raptor drive. The other thing is that it is very, very quiet. I live in a quiet part of London and I can't hear the PC from 2 metres away over the background noise - I have to look at the power light to tell whether it's on. Still, I may experiment with some quieter fans just for the hell of it.

There are a couple of bad things though. It doesn't seem to want to sleep and just wakes up immediately, and it has blue-screened a couple of times. I haven't managed to track down the cause of these yet, but hopefully a service pack or later drivers for something will fix it. Vista x64 drivers are still fairly new and a little unstable, so it's not entirely unexpected.

Oh, and did I mention it cost just over £600 and a couple of hours labour to put together? You won't get anything of this quality from Dell for that money.

Update 25 April 2007:

It didn't take long... I cracked about buying a new TV tuner as it was annoying me not being able to pause/rewind TV and schedule recordings. I justified it to myself that it is a dual-tuner card though so I am getting more functionality. I went for a Hauppage WinTV NOVA-T-500 card which was listed on the Vista x64 HCL, however the drivers wouldn't install using the supplied installer program and they are unsigned which isn't allowed on Vista x64.

By hitting F8 before Windows boots, however, you can choose the option to skip driver signing verification and then I was able to use Device Manager to install the drivers manually from the extracted location, at which point the card installs and works fine, however you have to do this every time you boot Windows as it will not load unsigned drivers otherwise. I tried bcdedit -set nointegritychecks ON but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

So I'm undecided whether to keep the card... I'll try it out for a few days and see how much it annoys me, and whether it blue-screens.

Update 28 April 2007:

Good news! Hauppage have just released new drivers for the card which are signed and install fine on Vista x64. The card is working perfectly now, and I'd be happy to recommend it.