Help my Windows PC Search

March 4, 2006 7:48 AM

What is the best Windows PC setup? How well does Media Center work?

I am currently shopping around for a Windows PC. I want it primarily for basic computing tasks, plus definitely some games.

I keep going back and forth on whether to get a desktop or a laptop. Laptop gives me freedom to move around the house (this machine would probably never leave the house), but a desktop certainly gives me more power.

The more I looked into it, the more I've looked at desktops running Windows Media Center Edition. The particular one I am looking at has 2GB RAM, 250GB HD, 2.8 Intel Dual Core, 256MB Video (shared memory though, but a dedicated video card).

So my question is multi-part.

Is there a decently priced laptop that I can buy that will play things like Counter Strike Source, Half Life 2, Doom 3, etc.?

If I go the route of the desktop, how much system resources does the TV Tuner functions of MCE actually use? If I am playing a game, and recording a TV show at the same time, will the machine come to a grinding hault?

How well does the rollup 2 of MCE actually work? Is this going to be close to my Tivo experience, or will I be severely disappointed?

On shared video memory, it has 256MB shared as part of an NVidia GeForce 6200SE card. Never had shared memory on a video card in this amount. How will this impact performance?

posted by benjh to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I should also add I debated building my own, but found that pricing just wasn't matching up anymore with what you can buy premanufactured.
posted by benjh at 7:53 AM on March 4, 2006

If I go the route of the desktop, how much system resources does the TV Tuner functions of MCE actually use? If I am playing a game, and recording a TV show at the same time, will the machine come to a grinding hault?

I've never used MCE, so I can't say how CPU-intensive the recording function is, but I can say that a dual core processor should help enormously with this sort of thing.
posted by musicinmybrain at 8:05 AM on March 4, 2006

That video arrangement is perfectly fine for running windows MCE, which is actually more graphically demanding than you might think, but it is near the bottom of what you can buy today for games like HL2 (like 1/3rd the performance of a $110 6600GT card).

I'm not sure about CPU utilization. For one thing, it's not clear to me whether the tuner in that PC has a hardware MPEG2 encoder, but my guess is that it doesn't. I'd guess ~50% utilization on one of the cores, which would leave one core free for gaming. Hardware encoding would drop that number, but from what I've read, MCE is still pretty processor intensive even with a HW MPEG encoder.

I've not used a Tivo, and haven't really done much with MCEs DVR capability, so I can't help you there.

You might check The Green Button, which is a community dedicated to MCE.
posted by Good Brain at 9:05 AM on March 4, 2006

My friend gave me his TiVo when he set up an MCE box. A hulking loud dual tuner setup. I had tried to build one in a mini atx case, and after much struggle of getting it to recognize and play nice with all the hardware, it simply refused to play mpeg2, which made it worthless. I bought a couple of different mpeg2 codecs to no avail. So it was a waste of time and money on my part. If you're starting from scratch, save yourself the hassle and buy a pre-installed box.

MCE isn't bad, but it will be a little disappointing compared to your TiVo experience. The fast forward speeds are all wrong, and don't do that nice rewind at the end for you. There's no "last" button on the remote. The menus are sometimes too deep, and you have to go through 3 actions instead of one. On my friend's box, the video often starts glitching, and requires a reboot. Sometimes some other part of Windows will fail, popping up and error, and he'll return to find it hasn't been recording his shows. And there's some program he has to run whenever he reboots to get the audio to function. I've never asked the details on that. I know the MC volume depends on the system volume, and theres issues getting the TV, receiver and pc all set to levels where the volume up/down will be usable.

So all-in-all it's as you would expect. It's the difference between running dedicated hardware versus running software on a Windows box. It does the job, it's just not as slick or reliable.
posted by team lowkey at 10:19 AM on March 4, 2006

That video card is incredibly underpowered for Doom 3 or Oblivion, and not so great for Half-Life 2, either (ATI and Valve had a partnership resulting in HL2 being much more heavily optimized for ATI cards than nVidia).

I'd urge you to build your own if you go the desktop route if at all possible. For the gaming laptop route your options are either the Dell XPS series or several smaller performance laptop vendors of the Alienware variety. In either of those cases you'll probably get fairly ripped off - getting a decent gaming laptop for under $2500 is as near to impossible as makes no odds.

I'm going to list what I'd go with for building your own, and if you decide to build prefab anyway, then you can consider this a list of future upgrades if nothing else.

Case: Antec Sonata II - very heavily geared towards a silent rig, rubber mountings for the harddrives, most of the screws use big textured heads intended for your fingers and not a screwdriver, so no tools necessary except to mount motherboards and HDDs. Incredible case.
$100

Motherboard: A8N SLI - it's an Asus motherboard, it's SLI, it's the last AMD chipset devoid of Trusted Computing crap, and it overclocks pretty nicely. Two weaknesses: needs a BIOS patch as soon as humanly possible once you've got the system running, and in an SLI config both cards will be PCI-E 8x, as opposed to one card at 16x. Alternatively spend $210 and get the A8N32 which will run two cards at 16x.
$115

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3700+ - definitely the sweet spot for price/performance right now. This is something you'll want to upgrade to the dual-core 4400+ or 4800+ in about 18 months once games start taking advantage of multiple processors, and the prices go down. Right now you will see little benefit - and often take a minor performance hit - for going dual-core.
$215

RAM: Corsair 2GB (2x1GB) PC3200 2ns - two sticks means you get the advantage of dual-channel with both being accessed simultaneously. Corsair is up there with Crucial for quality brands, and the latency is nice for gaming. Important note: with the A8N SLI motherboard the timings will automatically be detected as 3-3-3-8. Manually lowering it in your BIOS to the 2-6-6-7 timings advertised will prevent your system from booting properly. Use 2.5-6-6-7 instead and save yourself a half hour digging this info up.
$175 after a $40 mail-in

Video Card: eVGA 7800GT - modestly overclocked out of the box, this is the cheapest 7800GT. Works great and can be overclocked further if you like but there's no reason to. Runs cool but the fan is quite loud and will unfortunately nix some of the benefit of the otherwise whisper-quiet machine we've assembled thus far. This is very much the price/performance sweet spot right now given the ridiculous prices on 7800GTX's. You take a 10% performance hit and save $170 - in 18 months you buy a second one and get an 80% performance boost.
$265 after $20 mail-in

DVD: NEC DVD+/-RW with DVD+R Dual-Layer - it's an amazingly cheap dual-layer burner that's quieter than the price would have you believe. Get it.
$40

Total thus far: $910

Harddrive, mouse, keyboard, and monitor are at the user's discretion - I used preexisting ones. Monitors being the most difficult to properly select of those I'll say that I use a Dell 2001FP which gives me 1600x1200 and with 16ms response time is barely fast enough for gaming. Part of this choice is that most games are still locked into 4:3 formats. If I had to choose again I'd go with the Viewsonic VP930 - Tom's Hardware's coverage of it is very convincing.

I'm currently using this system and it runs everything I can throw at it (BF2, Quake 4, Half-Life 2) at 1600x1200 with 2xanti-aliasing with all max settings absolutely flawlessly. I get 70FPS minimum on the densest BF2 maps, although Quake 4 cutscenes will dip to 30FPS with everything maxed. I expect I'll be overclocking the CPU 10% and the videocard to 475/1200 for Oblivion until the first few patches hit - that's just a given with Bethesda products.

Not having any experience with Media Center I can't offer any advice. But if you want to play the latest games for the next 18-24 months with all the bells and whistles enabled for as cheap as possible, I think the above setup and upgrade plan is about the cheapest possible way to do so.
posted by Ryvar at 10:47 AM on March 4, 2006

Manually lowering it in your BIOS to the 2-6-6-7 timings advertised will prevent your system from booting properly. Use 2.5-6-6-7 instead and save yourself a half hour digging this info up.

Sorry, pulled an all-nighter and this is mangled garbage that could bite somebody in the ass if they use my post for reference. I mean to type that you should use 2.5-3-3-6 instead of the given settings of 2-3-3-6 or the auto-detect settings of 3-3-3-8. In your BIOS it would look like this:

CAS# latency: 2.5
Min RAS# active time: 6
RAS# to CAS# delay: 3
Row precharge time: 3

Sorry about that.
posted by Ryvar at 11:40 AM on March 4, 2006

If you are planning to game then you should really look into AMD and a real video card -- that means nothing integrated and none of this shared memory nonsense. That geforce 6200 is an almost ran. You're looking at really crap FPS with that.

I wouldn't even think about trying to do realtime video encoding/capturing while playing a game, even if you have a dual core CPU. You will either get jerky motion in the game or you'll drop frames in the encode. If you had an external dedicated hardware mpeg2 encoder then the situation might be different. Software encoding though, forget it.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:03 PM on March 4, 2006

er, I meant "also ran" not "almost ran". doh.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:05 PM on March 4, 2006

Echoing what the others said. The fact is, virtually all the consumer machines you see for sale in the big-box stores are built for multimedia, NOT gaming, as I found out recently while shopping. I brought home an HP Media Center machine that had been reconditioned -- a good buy. But I put in a Radeon card to replace the crummy Intel grahpics. It renders Media Center more-or-less unusable, but that's not why I bought it -- for now I'm sticking with my cable-company-supplied Motorola dual-tuner PVR.

team lowkey: The fast forward speeds are all wrong, and don't do that nice rewind at the end for you.

Argh! I HATE that little rewind at the end. After 20 years, I'm quite capable at hitting the spot where I want to stop, and that so-called "feature" just buggers me up.
posted by evilcolonel at 6:08 PM on March 4, 2006