Monday, January 14, 2008
Quad Core Media Center PC
Our Media Center PC reached its end of life when we returned from our holidays and found that it wouldn't boot. I had a look at the internals and I found that the power supply was dead. The power supply wasn't a standard off the shelf part that we could easily replace so we bit the bullet and went shopping for a new media center PC. We choose the following:
HP m8190a Media Center PC with:
- Intel Core 2 Quad processor Q66002.4GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB, EM64T, Execute Disable Bit
- Intel G33 Express Chipset
- Memory - 2048MB DDR2
- Integrated Intel High Definition Audio, 7.1 Surround Sound Ready
- Hard drive - 500.0 GB 3G Serial ATA hard drive at 7200RPM
- SuperMulti SATA Drive with Lightscribe Technology, Double Layer (8.5GB)
- HD DVD Player for high definition movies 2.4x HD DVD-ROM, 5x DVD-ROM, 15x CD-ROM
- nVidia GeForce 8600GT 3D PCI-Express Graphics card with 512MB DDR2 dedicated graphics memory with HDMI, DVI and TV-out capability
- Wireless 802.11 b/g LAN
- Single PAL TV Tuner HP
- Media Center Remote Control
- 15-in-1 Digital Media Reader
So far it's been a beast, runs media center really smoothly, all the HD channels are crystal clear without any stuttering etc. I'm a little annoyed about the HD DVD drive, we bought it a day before the HD war was won by Blue-ray, we got given a copy of Harry Potter in HD DVD, pretty funny.
I've dropped some more hard drives in it and intend to replace the single tuner with a dual tuner from the old media center PC. The good news was that the old media center PC was put into a new case and is working fine (apart from all the connectors that were on the old HP case), this upgrade was planned for later in the year, so it doesn't really matter in the scheme of things.
Monday, January 14, 2008 1:32:54 AM UTC
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