CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3800+
(www.amd.com)
As I already mentioned, AMD Athlon 64/FX is gaining a broader reputation as the chip of choice for high-performance PC enthusiasts. Critics argue that integrating the memory controller into the CPU was a mistake because it limits the chip’s ability to upgrade to new memory formats. This is true, but you can’t argue the fact that DDR2 has yet to show much if any advantage over DDR.

Moreover, memory vendors have excelled at developing super-low latency modules for the performance market that really show off the benefits of the Athlon 64’s integrated design.

Add to this Advanced Virus Protection, AMD’s outstanding HyperTransport bus technology, forward-looking support for 64-bit software code, and the very important Cool’n’Quiet. Especially for media center configurations, where noise and temperature regulation are critical, Cool’n’Quiet is indispensable for a high-end box stocked with power-hungry parts.

Why did I pick the 3800+? Honestly, because it came with my ATI review kit. In a perfect world, I would have preferred the FX-55 or at least the Athlon 64 4000+, which has the same frequency as the 3800+ but 1MB of L2 cache instead of 512K. But we can’t have (or afford) everything in life.

Heatsink: Zalman CNPS7700-Cu
(www.zalmanusa.com)
I’ve had a Zalman 7000 heatsink on my test bench for over two years and swear by it. This is the best, quietest, coolest-looking air cooler I’ve ever had the pleasure to review, and I’m very glad that Zalman has been able to update its packaging to include mounts for the LGA775 and Socket 939 designs.

Essentially, the 7700-Cu is a 120 mm fan embedded in an outward-radiating circle of copper fins. With the oversized fan, the heatsink is able to spin at 1,000 to 1,400 RPM and be virtually silent while still doing a perfectly good job of chip cooling under regular use conditions. The fan can ratchet up to a maximum of 2,000 RPM for heavy loads, which still tops out at a comparatively hushed 32 dB, and includes an adjustable speed control in case your motherboard doesn’t support smart fan management.

The heatsink’s only drawback is its size and weight, which is why I was glad the Ahanix D4 was so spacious. But when you want the finest for an ATX-based media center, the 7700-Cu is the best you’ll get this side of water cooling.

Memory: 2 x 512MB OCZ EL PC3200 EL Platinum R2 (2-2-2-5) RAM
(www.ocztechnology.com)
I’ve tested just about every major brand of memory out there and have found OCZ to have the highest speed performance and greatest overclockability in the DDR category. (Until the 925XE supports PC2-667, my vote isn’t in yet for DDR2.) Now, while I’m not an overclocker as a rule, these OCZ Platinum modules can be pushed to 2.9V (and further, although you’ll officially violate the warranty) for some outrageous results ranging from 25% to 40% above 400 MHz. What I was really after was the ultra-low 2-2-2-5 timings, which tied in stunningly with the ATI Bullhead and AMD’s integrated memory controller. I prefer my performance at default settings and only want to push matters on rare occasion.

The copper heatspreaders and mirrored platinum finish are a nice, flashy touch that unfortunately goes to waste in my buried box. Personally, I find OCZ’s lifetime warranty more appealing. Sometimes, OCZ comes under fire for not manufacturing their own chips. (In this case, the components are by Samsung.) However, in a way I feel better knowing that OCZ hand-picked the highest performing chips for their parts rather that feeling compelled to user slightly lower-grade chips in order to cycle through inventory. The Platinum Rev 2 is the finest DDR400 money can buy and an ideal fit for any heavily stressed media center.

Hard Drives: 2 x 250GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (www.maxtor.com) with
200GB Seagate External Drive (www.seagate.com)
My storage strategy is slightly different from John’s. Because my media center should also be a high-performance, all-purpose system that the entire family uses throughout the day, I want the best mix of speed and security possible. This is why I chose a matched pair of DiamondMax 10 drives, which are about the closest you can get to SCSI in an ATA design, and configured them in a mirrored RAID 1.

Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10 drives use the SATA interface, which is always preferable in a system where airflow, performance, and extensibility are important. The drives’ 7,200 RPM spin rate is the best you can get in an ATA drive without dropping down to 2.5” platters and thus severely limiting storage capacity. Maxtor’s 250GB model uses a mammoth 16MB cache buffer, and the integration of dual onboard controllers plus native command queuing (NCQ) puts this model at the top of the ATA food chain.

Still, despite Maxtor’s well-known quality, I wouldn’t trust my data to a single drive, which is why I use the Bullhead’s integrated Silicon Image RAID technology to mirror the twin 250GB units. This one volume holds everything from the operating system and apps to recent TV recordings to the “best of” my family’s videos, photos, and music collection. This “best of” material is pulled from other drive archives located elsewhere in the house. I put it on this box primarily for redundancy but also so my wife won’t have to navigate across multiple LAN machines to find her favorite content.

Finally, I use the Seagate 200GB External Drive to back up this “best of” material one last time. Functionally, the drive does almost nothing to contribute to the media center. However, since the media center is located in the home’s highest traffic area, this is where I want a backup drive placed in case of an emergency, such as a fire. If there are 20 extra seconds to grab anything in the home before we flee, this drive is the most valuable thing in the house. Silverware and such can be replaced, but losing the digital photos and videos on that drive would be a significant loss to my family for generations to come. I expect you’ll find that nearly all of your consumer customers have neglected to take this preventative measure. Now that you’re selling them a system bound for their main living space, this upsell item will appeal to just about any family folk.

Optical Drive: Samsung Writemaster TS-H552B
(www.samsung.com)
DVD burning is a critical part of my media center experience, but not for myself. I’m all for the gradual eradication of physical media from my already overcrowded home. What I want is the ability to quickly and easily let people who enjoy the contents of my media center go home with something in their hands, whether it’s an animated slideshow of photos or a copy of the video I shot last week. Or maybe those one or two non-commercial DVDs in my collection that don’t have copy protection. Ahem.

Samsung’s latest and greatest internal burner has everything I could ask for...except a black face, which doesn’t matter so much thanks to Ahanix’s bay door. The drive supports double-layer writing as well as 16X DVD+R, 12X DVD-R, and 4X +RW burning. This is fairly standard fare, but Samsung goes further with technologies such as Silent Pulse Width Modulation and an Automatic Ball Balancing System to reduce vibration noise at high speeds. The drive engine is able to tilt the disc dynamically to compensate for any warping, and it can also reduce spin speeds in order to assist in reading dirty or scratched media. This is important stuff, because the last thing a media center user wants to deal with while entertaining is read/write errors.

Display: NEC-Mitsubishi 40” LCD4000
(www.necmitsubishi.com)
I debated long and hard over this one, because dropping several grand on a display is no easy matter. In deciding to go for LCD over plasma, I had to admit two things to myself: 1) On-screen text matters as much to me as movies in this environment. After all, I’m a writer and Web junky, and my wife hangs out on email for half of the day. (Don’t tell her I said that.) The sharper edges in LCD make for a much better viewing experience in such applications. 2) We’re busy, scatterbrained people in my house, and none of us has the discipline to turn off the screen when we’re done with it. Moreover, we’re all home throughout the day, and this combination leads to significant phosphor burn-in risks and a greatly accelerated time to half-life.

NEC-Mitsubishi’s LCD4000 has the black bezel while the 4000e is silver, and 40” is just about as big as LCD panels come now. Like John, I wanted 1280 x 768 resolution support, and this set’s formidable 23 ms response time is fast enough for my eyes not to see any action ghosting.

Brightness and contrast are rated at 450 cd/m2 and 600:1, but as we saw in our large displays feature, that could mean anything. The upshot is that this set is plenty bright for an indoor setting, and the contrast range looks excellent.

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 6 6800GT
(www.nvidia.com)
In this one thing more than probably any other, I wanted the best. The only problem is that I can’t decide who has the best card. If you look at DOOM III results, the answer is NVIDIA’s GeForce 6 6800 Ultra and Ultra Extreme. If you look at Half-Life 2, the answer swings to the ATI X800 XT. So I tossed a quarter, and it came up NVIDIA. Far greater decisions in world history have been decided with less.

I picked the 6800GT because of thermal and space reasons. The idea of consuming two slots instead of one with the Ultra still bugs me, and—call me crazy—games still look as good to me at 125 fps as they do at 119. The price and heat bump just wasn’t worth it to me.

The 6800GT sports GDDR3 memory (my reference card has 256MB) on a 256-bit memory bus. If I really want to go hog wild on graphics down the road, I can always make use of NVIDIA’s SLI GPU bonding technology. The twin DVI out ports (and no VGA) may come in handy in very high-end dual-display media center installations. Once you get through the long list core technology bullet points, media center users will be interested to hear about NVIDIA’s hardware-based accelerator for WMV9 decoding, MPEG encoding and decoding up to 1920 x 1080i, the excellent video scaling and filtering functionality, and Digital Vibrance Control, which is NVIDIA’s fancy phrase for advanced color and sharpening enhancement. I’ve now spent many weeks with this card in a host of intensive applications and have nothing but glowing praise for it.

I should point out here that I didn’t select the 6800GT solely for gaming. Top-shelf graphics cards also have a role to play in HDTV encoding.

“Certainly for some of the high-definition video, like WMV9 and high-def MPEG, if you don’t have enough horsepower you won’t be able to decode that content at an appropriate frame rate,” says Scott Vouri, vice president of NVIDIA’s media center group. “For most media center experiences, such as a DVD or video off your hard drive or watching regular television, you’ll be fine with most graphics cards, but we’re recommending an FX 5700 or any 6800 for HD content. In fact, we have a dedicated core in all our GeForce 6 GPUs that just does video processing. Consequently, because of our scaling and filtering and other things that we’ve integrated in silicon rather than the programmable GPU, our playback of high-definition content has crystal clarity.”

For anti-noise crusaders who don’t need HD support, consider the 6200, which uses passive cooling.

TV Tuner: NVIDIA NVTV (www.nvidia.com) and
ATI HDTV WONDER (www.ati.com)
My media center system has an NVIDIA NVTV 200 tuner card in it, which shipped with Microsoft’s MCE 2005 reviewer’s kit. There is virtually no information available about this card yet, so I can only give you the rough sketch. The NVTV is NVIDIA’s internal TV tuner line, and the 200 model features two tuner “cans” on the card (plus an FM tuner), effectively yielding two tuners in a single slot. The idea is for users to be able to record two shows simultaneously or watch one show while recording another.

The image quality out of my NVTV 200 is excellent, and recordings look every bit as good to my eye as the source signal, so the LSI DVxplore MPEG-2 codec NVIDIA licensed for this card appears to have been the right choice. The way NVIDIA explained the concept to me was that you took a single coax feed, split it, and then plugged each fork into its own connector on the card. This might work with a bare analog cable (I haven’t tried it), but I’m pretty sure that all modern set-tops only output one single channel stream, so splitting it would still only give you one channel. You would need two set-tops to make proper use of the card, and the line would have to get split before reaching the decoder boxes. I’m not guaranteeing the cable and satellite providers will approve of this, you know? A one-slot dual-tuner is a pretty slick idea, but I’d wager most customers will be just fine with the regular NVTV.

The one product that might blow NVIDIA, Hauppauge, and everybody else off the map is ATI’s forthcoming Theater 550 solution, which was set to be released in late October but still hasn’t shipped as of this writing. The Theater 550, developed by the company’s digital TV group, succeeds the Theater 200 now on ATI’s tuner cards. ATI reports that the new chip will offer an on-board MPEG-2 hardware encoder, MPEG-2 hardware noise reduction, motion estimation for better image clarity, and much more. Theater 550 implementations will also be the only video product in the known near future to utilize an x1 PCIe slot.

That all said, you still need to solve the HDTV problem. As we’ve mentioned previously, MCE is able to record HDTV streams, but it cannot tune them from an encrypted set-top signal at full resolution. You can view HDTV stations at standard definition under MCE, but you can’t record them at all. Every rival media center platform I’ve seen doesn’t support HDTV, period, including SnapStream’s BeyondTV. Still, this condition won’t last forever, especially now that ATI’s HDTV WONDER card is available.

The HDTV WONDER is a PCI card that ships with a metal DTV antenna and ATI’s MULTIMEDIA CENTER suite. Because I opted for BeyondTV to power my media center, I’m pretty much hosed in the HDTV space for the moment. I can watch tuned-in HDTV stations with ATI’s software, but I can’t record it in high-def. I should just pack this up and send it to John for his MCE box, but I’m still holding out hope for BeyondTV 4.0.

“The only way to view full HD under MCE is to use a card like the HDTV WONDER with an antenna,” says Matthew Witheiler, product manager in the multimedia group at ATI. “All of the major broadcasters across the United States are broadcasting HD signals. It’s something that the federal government has mandated by January 1, 2007. Over 1,100 stations broadcast HDTV, and something like 99.4% of North America is covered by digital TV signals. It would really help resellers to realize that HD signals are all around us and are really accessible in a combination like MCE 2005 and our HDTV WONDER. You just click a button, it goes out and finds what’s available in your area, and adds it to the channel list in your EPG. They share the same EPG data as your analog stations.”

Audio: Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum
(www.creative.com)
By now, you know the drill on the Audigy 2 ZS: 108 dB SNR for unmatched signal clarity, DVD-Audio support, 24-bit/192 kHz for stereo and 24/96 for 5.1 surround, and maximum output, and built-on FireWire for good measure. I love this card and wouldn’t put anything else in my pride and joy media center.

The thing that makes the Platinum worth noting is the (black faced!) 5.25” bay breakout box. This is a great fit for a home theater environment because it features input and output ports for optical SPDIF, coax SPDIF, 1/4” stereo, MIDI, RCA stereo in, and FireWire. You could plug in anything from a tape deck to an electric guitar. Music and stereo afficionados will love this feature, and it’s something you’re not likely to find in competing media center configurations.

Wireless Desktop: Gyration Media Center Remote & Keyboard
(www.gyration.com)
If you’ve never used a Gyration mouse before, this little wonder will blow your mind. The remote control uses gyroscopic sensors to detect the device’s motion in three dimensions. Like a conductor before an orchestra, if you depress the trigger on the bottom and wave the wand down, the on-screen cursor moves down. Move the remote in a circle and the pointer makes a circle. The accuracy you can achieve in just a few minutes is very impressive.

The remote is much simpler than the Microsoft MCE remote, in part because this set isn’t necessarily built for MCE. The only requirement is Windows XP, although there are plenty of programmable hooks to MCE areas, such as My TV, My Pictures, etc. If you miss the alpha-numeric keypad on Microsoft’s remote, Gyration supplies an on-screen keyboard at the press of a button. In fact, there are over 80 functions you can assign to buttons and “swipes,” or specific motion patterns you can teach the remote. The comfortable 88-key keyboard is less flashy but still a great fit for the living room because of its compact size. I stash mine in the magazine rack beside the couch.

Gyration uses a 49 MHz radio with eight channels, providing up to a 100-foot range. Both components combined require eight AAA batteries, so you may want to sell rechargeables along with this set.

Remote Media in the House: D-Link DSM-320
(www.dlink.com)
The DSM-320 may look a lot like the Linksys Extender, right down to the 17” width for matching other CE components. The back features ports for 10/100 LAN, component and composite video, RCA audio, S-Video, and optical and coax SPDIF. The flip-up antenna can connect to the WLAN via 802.11g (no 802.11a option exists). Functionally, the box is much like an Extender, but the interface is completely different.

D-Link covers much of the same ground as an Extender in that there are areas for Music, Photo, Video, and Online Media. Slapping up a slide show is easy, video looks great even over wireless, and navigation is intuitive, although not quite as brainless as MCE. However, D-Link is very aggressive about delivering firmware updates. The company wanted to get the box onto the market as soon as possible then work to refine the functionality as time went along. For example, when my unit arrived it only offered AOL Radio as an online subscription service. Now it also does Napster and Rhapsody. Also, the UI and stability have greatly improved. Right before press time, I learned that D-Link will soon be supporting WPA security (so my videos will be more secure than John’s) and more codecs.

Speaking of which, codecs are why I wanted this unit. Extenders are great for WMV, WMA, and MP3 but pretty hit and miss elsewhere. D-Link supports the Microsoft formats, but also adds Xvid and, most importantly, MPEG-4. Since I’m doing a lot of MPEG-4 conversion for my PMP, having a remote media player that could support the same codec was important to me.

Remote Media on the Road: Archos AV480
(www.archos.com)
Don’t get me wrong. I love the PMC device platform. Simple is beautiful. But absolutely nothing else on the market comes close to the Archos 400 series. A bit smaller than the Zen, this unit is slightly less intuitive than a PMC, but you’ll master it within 10 or 15 minutes. The 80GB HDD-equipped AV480 is primarily a JPEG and BMP viewer, WMA and MP3 player, and MPEG-4 player, although it can also show XviD and DivX files. The built-in 320 x 240 display is gorgeous in its crispness and color depth, and this shouldn’t be understated. I’ve been through half a dozen handheld video players, and nothing approaches Archos’ screen quality.

Cooler yet, the AV480 can use output jacks to send MPEG-4 videos to a big screen at up to 704 x 480 at 30 fps, and the results look really good. The device can record in WAV format, including via the integrated microphone. Perhaps best of all, the AV480 also works as a video recorder in MPEG-4 format. If you don’t mind a little legwork, it can even function as a PVR with the included TV Cradle, able to change channels on your set-top and capture scheduled shows.

I love nearly everything about this unit—CF Type I slot, almost a five-hour battery life for video viewing, the spacious hard drive (the AV420 sports a 20GB drive for less money), the bundled software, on and on. It can even record Macrovision-protected shows at 320 x 240 resolution. The PMC is a great family device, but the AV480 is a media nut’s dream come true.

Media Center Platform: SnapStream BeyondTV 3.5 with Beyond Media (www.snapstream.com)
Again, we delved into BeyondTV last month, so I won’t belabor the point here. Essentially, speaking for myself, the choice between SnapStream and MCE 2005 came down to SmartSkip (the automatic commercial skipping engine) and ShowSqueeze (the amazing transcoding engine) versus HDTV support. Given that we still don’t watch much HD content in our house, I went for power over simplicity. Also, every once in a while, I find SnapStream’s ability to schedule recordings via the Web a big help. Think of all those “D’oh! I forgot to program the VCR!” moments you’ve had.

Keep in mind that there are ways to tweak SnapStream to get closer to the MCE experience. For example, I set ShowSqueeze to take every TV recording and convert it into a 320 x 240 MPEG-2 file, then use another app to transcode to MPEG-4 and save into the My Videos folder. I have Windows Media Player 10 set to monitor this folder and automatically sync it to my AV480 whenever the handheld is connected. That’s not quite as simple as MCE, but MPEG-4 video looks better on the AV480 than the same show does in MPEG-2/WMV on the Creative Zen. Again, here’s a great way for you to add value.

If You Build It...

Remember what Intel’s Centrino ad campaign did for notebook sales and wireless adoption? Well, the marketing whizzes are at it again, only their time they’re out to spread the MCE gospel. In 38 high-traffic malls across the country, holiday shoppers are getting what will often be their first look at a media center PC. The booths—err, Experience Zones—illustrate how Windows MCE and a Hyper-Threading-enabled Pentium 4 can work together to enable sharing of photos, videos, and music as well as all of the slick PVR work tied to MCE’s TV functionality. Microsoft has stated that the Digital Joy campaign, which runs through January 10th before spreading overseas to the U.K., Germany, and Japan, will cost in the “several tens of millions” of dollars.

This is exactly the kind of interest generation the PC channel needs to spur media center sales. Even if you’re note selling MCE 2005, simply driving the concept of what a media center is and how it works will help boost interest in other solutions. But since Microsoft and Intel are pouring all of this effort into promoting MCE, hitching a ride and tying your operation to the media center concept in your community isn’t a bad idea.

“We’re launching a worldwide marketing campaign aimed at driving awareness of the product,” says Microsoft’s Mike Coleman, lead product manager for MCE. “So hopefully a consumer will already know what the product is, and then the system builder just has to tell people that they’ve got it. We’re trying to do a lot of that heavy lifting, because MCE is the kind of product that, until you see it and touch it, it’s a little hard to understand how it can change the way you enjoy entertainment in your house. I think system builders will want to pay attention to the messages we’re putting out.”

Naturally, the Digital Joy campaign is promoting the closest tier-one partners Microsoft has, especially HP. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for the channel in the long run. We all know that MCE may be a snap to operate, but it can be a bear to install and configure, and many people will need help in this process that the original system vendors can’t provide. In addition, guru wanna-bes are likely to find themselves an OEM version of the OS at outlets such as Newegg.com and upgrade themselves into a real bind.

“A lot of people are going to go out there and install MCE 2005 on whatever they want,” says Howard Manson, general manager for Bass Computers. “They say, hey, it’s just an upgrade! But it’s not. The hardware’s very specific, so there will be some problems there. And let’s face it: There are plenty of end-users out there who will plug the wrong audio cable into the wrong jack and think that the whole thing’s busted. That’s why the system builder can sell this better than the tier-ones. They can get into the homes and deal with these issues.”

A few large resellers have gone so far as to ignore off-the-shelf cases and design their own boxes specifically for media center applications. One British system builder contracted with a local manufacturing company to design a wholly new chassis with the Microsoft IR receiver ripped apart and installed such that the receiver mounted flush against the inside of the chassis face, just like a traditional home theater component.

We’re not suggesting that most resellers have the resources to undertake custom manufacturing, but at least realize that media center PCs are not like regular systems. People feel a deep emotional connection to their multimedia content, and the more you can do to help customers form an emotional attachment to your designs the better. Perhaps you have a list of value-add mods that you can apply to boxes—LED tubes, airbrushed designs, alternate fan grilles, and so on. If cosmetics don’t strike a chord with clients, be ready to demonstrate the difference between a standard media center box and a silent one. Noise is a huge selling point for high-traffic rooms, particularly when one of the primary applications can involve straining to hear the content.

If adding value inside and on the box isn’t enough, explore ways to add value in how you connect the box. What if the customer has another home theater component with DVI output, perhaps even a second PC? Most system builders wouldn’t know that Gefen (www.gefen.com) makes a 2x1 HDTV switcher with bundled IR remote for $250 retail. Sure, $250 is steep, but displays like John’s and mine only have one DVI port, and Gefen’s box is a lot cheaper than alternative options for customers who want to have their cake and eat it, too.

Going even further out, you’re going to see media center systems tie increasingly into the home security and home automation spaces. Why not? A PC can control locks and HVAC systems as well as play a DVD. The trick is getting yourself licensed to do security installations in your state. “It’s not hard to get a Class B license,” says Bass Computers’ Manson. “And let’s face it: If you were in business in 1999, and you’re in business today, you did something right. In that thinking, these people should be open to and prepared for new markets. And security is their next best market, because all security cameras are going IP-based. Control systems can’t stay analog forever. They’ve got to get on a single interface, and IP is the way to go.”

Over these last two issues, we’ve taken a long look at the workings and possibilities involved in media center systems. But the truth is that we’ve only scratched the surface. Smart integrators will find ways such as the ones we’ve described to create higher margin media center configurations. The smarter integrators will work to take these customized boxes and massage them into people’s environments in ways that they never thought possible before.

You have to be creative. You’re going to have to communicate with buyers more thoroughly than perhaps you ever have before. The pay-off is worth it, though. These technologies will change your customers’ daily lives, but they may also transform your business in the process.