Digital Home Thoughts: Building Your Own Media Center PC

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Thursday, February 22, 2007

Building Your Own Media Center PC

Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 08:00 AM


Step 3: Picking the Core Components
Once I made the decision on the Shuttle, it was time to pack it full of components. As is the case with most Shuttle XPC units, I needed to supply the CPU, RAM, hard drive, video card, optical drive, and TV tuner. Here's the logic that went into each of my decisions about the components for this particular project:

CPU: It had been a few years since I'd last used an AMD processor, but I've always liked their products. At the time I was shopping for components (early 2005), the most powerful AMD processor on the market was the AMD 64 FX55, but it was a whopping $950 CAN. Although I wanted some serious CPU firepower, I wasn't prepared to spend this much on a CPU since it wasn't a gaming or video editing machine. I looked at the more moderately priced AMD 64 series CPUs, which lacked only the massive 2MB cache of the FX series, and they seemed like a better fit for this project. The sweet spot for price/performance was the AMD 64 3500+. The 3800+ was a big jump in price, while the 3400+ was almost the same price for slightly less performance. Since the CPU is one of the most expensive components in your MCE 2005 computer, it makes sense to watch the market and not buy your CPU until you're ready to build the machine. High-definition content is also becoming more common, usually in the form of HD movie trailers, and these require a great deal of CPU power to decode, so it makes sense to go as fast as you can reasonably afford.

In terms of AMD versus Intel, while the AMD processor has a lot of bang for the buck, I do miss the hyperthreading available on my Intel processors. It's not a significant issue in most day to day scenarios, but when the CPU is focused 100% on a single task, it can make for jerky multitasking. As an example, I use an MCE plugin called dCut - I have it set to automatically take certain TV shows and transcode them into 640 x 480 WMV files for archiving. When dCut is transcoding the videos, the AMD CPU is firing away at 100% use, making using the computer useless for almost anything else. If the AMD had a second CPU thread, one would be devoted to dCut and the other to other tasks on the computer. This issue will vanish over time as the industry transitions to dual-core CPUs.

2007 Update: Intel's Core 2 Duo processor is what I would have chosen for this project now. Great performance, low thermal output, and easy to overclock.


Figure 4: The AMD 64 3500+ CPU.

RAM: A simple rule of thumb is that the most you expect your computer to do for you at once, the more RAM it should have. Since this machine would be running an FTP server, Web server, network backup software, the MCE interface and potentially two video streams at the same time (one local, one over the network), I knew I couldn't get by with a mere 512 MB of RAM. Since the Shuttle SN95G5 had two RAM slots, I wanted to fill them both. There are a lot of different types of RAM on the market, but since this machine wasn't being used for gaming, I was interested more in the quantity of RAM rather than how fast it was (no CAS2 bling-bling RAM needed). I found a good balance between price and performance in Kingston's ValueRAM series. 2GB of Kingson ValueRAM was $500 CAN, giving me a lot of RAM for a reasonable investment. I used to be partial to Crucial RAM, but after using several Kingston Flash cards for years, I knew they made quality components and have been pleased with the performance of the Kingston ValueRAM.

Over the past few months I've monitored the system's RAM usage, and it looks like 2 GB of RAM was overkill. Even with the unit doing quadruple duty (Web server, FTP server, TV recording, TV playback), RAM usage never went above 600-700 MB in total. I could get by with 1 GB of RAM quite easily, which would have saved me some money. On the plus side, however, I can push the machine hard and it remains responsive.

2007 Update: RAM prices being what they are, and the fact that Vista can take advantage of RAM better than XP, I'd say 2 GB is still a good bet.


Figure 5: Two gigabytes of Kingston ValueRAM. Tasty!

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