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Media Center Hardware

Judging from the postings in the Media Center newsgroup, hardware seems to be one of the greatest sources of grief. People who built their own Media Center computers don't seem to have nearly as many problems. What do we know that PC manufacturers don't seem to be able to figure out?

While I seem to have built a nice working system, others who build their own have their share of problems. There are many reasons for this, but I believe that with proper selection of parts, anyone can build an MCE system that works well. A section on picking your parts is below.

Connection Diagrams

I'm in the process of creating a series of connection diagrams for typical Media Center systems. As I create them, they will be listed here...

My Old System - A simple system with basic cable and a TV.
My New System - Working on the diagram, but now includes dual tuners, Vista, and two extenders.

My Hardware

I built my Media Center in May 2004 and have gone through Media Center 2002, 2004, SP2, 2005, and now Vista with only minimal problems. My system consists of:

MSI k8T Neo-FISR motherboard. This motherboard has 6 USB ports, SATA and dual IDE connections, one fireWire (IEEE 1394) port, the standard parallel and serial ports, and built-in audio. I added an AMD Athlon-64 3000 CPU and 2Gb of RAM.
Dual Hard Drives. I use a 80Gb drive for C: and a 500Gb drive for D:.
Hewlett Packard internal DVD+RW.
I originally got tired of the ATI 9550 display adapter I was using due to the drivers, so I replaced it with an eVGA nVidia 6600 GT. However, I had driver issues with that board under Vista so I replaced it with an ATI 2600Pro with 512Mb.
Hauppauge PVR-250MCE. At the time I built this system, Hauppauge was the preferred tuner manufacturer. I have since added a USB Pinnacle HD Pro tuner but all I use right now is the analog portion.
Microsoft Remote Control. There are a few more compatible remotes available today.
Saitek Eclipse II keyboard. Since I now only use extenders to access the media, I moved it into my office where it shares the keyboard, mouse, and display with several other PCs.

Tuners

Hauppauge PVR-150 MCE - probably the most popular inexpensive tuner available. Hauppauge has a long history of producing good tuners.
Hauppauge PVR-250 MCE - the predecessor of the 150. Mine works great.
Hauppauge PVR-500 MCE - the dual-tuner version. It has one problem - it only has two RF inputs on the back panel. If you want to send two sVideo signals to it, you need a special cable.
nVidia nVTV - a dual-tuner board that has two sVideo inputs as well as two RF inputs. Comes with a copy of the nVidia DVD decoder.

Graphics Adapters

There are basically three graphics families that work with MCE 2005 - Intel, nVidia, and ATI. The nVidia series should be 5200 or better (any of the 5000 or 6000 family). The ATI should be a 9500 or better. The Intel 915 is also supported, although I've only seen this chip used in laptop MCE systems.

The system originally used an nVidia 5700 but it toasted itself, probably due to the fact the card had no fan. I replaced it with an ATI 9550 and was reasonably happy with it but finally the driver software just proved too difficult to use and had problems as well. I replaced it with an eVGA nVidia 6600 GT, which handles the 1080i resolution quite well, and it is faster too. Nvidia's drivers have issues under Vista, however, and I had some issues with driver reboots. So I replaced it with an ATI 2600Pro 512K and am so far happy with it. Since this motherboard uses an AGP video slot, the days of being able to get good graphics boards are about gone.

Hard Drives

I tend to prefer Seagate drives because they have a 5-year warranty and I've never had a Seagate fail.

No matter which drive you use, you should make sure you get one that has at least 7,200 rpm (10,000 rpm is better, of course). These drives would have 8 Mb of cache memory. Avoid the slower 5,400 rpm drives with 2 mb cache as they just don't have enough moxie for Media Center functions.

Last Updated On 2/17/2009

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