Thursday, January 17, 2008
How to Build a Vista Media Center PC
Posted by Jeremy Charette in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 12:00 PM
Motherboards: One That Worked, One That Didn’t
For the motherboard I chose to go with an ECS RS485M-M. This board has an ATI Radeon X300 video chipset, more than enough for a Media Center application. In addition, it supports 4 SATA hard drives, for plenty of storage, and the DVI output will play nicely with the HDMI input on my TV with a DVI to HDMI adapter. The only thing this board is missing is Firewire, but for the price (I paid less than $50), it’s a small sacrifice.
Figure 8: The original Nvidia nForce based ASUS motherboard. What a Pandora's box that turned out to be.
I originally started this build with an ASUS motherboard based on Nvidia’s nForce chipset, but Vista compatibility issues caused a host of problems. iTunes caused the blue screen of death, and SATA driver problems (literally) fried the hard drive I was using. It was a great board with Firewire and HDMI output, but the complete lack of support from Nvidia has really caused me to lose faith in their products.
How to Get Content, and Where to Keep It
Figure 9: Hard Drive by Seagate, a 750GB Barracuda running at 7200 rpm. Plenty fast, and plenty big enough.
Speaking of storage…you can never have enough. Lucky for us, hard drive sizes keep going up and prices keep coming down. I opted for a 750GB Seagate Barracuda. It's in the current sweet spot of price vs. capacity, price competitive with most 500GB drives, but still cheaper per GB than the 1TB drives that are on the market right now. This particular drive runs at 7200 rpm, utilizes an SATA interface for up to 3.0 GBps transfer rates, and has a 16 MB onboard cache to keep things from bogging down. On the optical drive side of things, I just threw in an 8X DVD burner I had laying around. Nothing fancy, you can find them for under $30 these days.
Figure 10: Two cards, four tuners. These ADS Technology InstantHDTV cards have both analog and digital (HD) tuners onboard.
Next up: HDTV tuners. I decided to go with dual ADS Technology InstantHDTV tuner cards. They have both analog and HD tuners, and installed in two open PCI slots with no problems. Vista recognized them instantly, and automatically loaded the appropriate drivers.
Figure 11: In the future, people will get sharp, crisp, high definition tv from...antennas? Wacky but true.
TV tuners need antennas, and I tried a couple. Audiovox supplied their HDTVa amplified antenna, and Winegard sent along an SS-3000 antenna, also amplified. Both were easy and quick to setup, and provided a strong signal to the HD tuner cards. The Winegard SS-3000 was consistently about 20% stronger, and got the vote from my girlfriend as the more asthetically pleasing of the two. I did notice that both antennae had to be near a window facing Manhattan to get any signal at all. Other locations in the apartment resulted in dropped channels and lousy reception.
