Voodoo PC ARIA Media Center Evaluation @ [H] Consumer

I just wanted to say that was a great read. I was really curious when I saw that the review was of a Voodoo Media Center PC. I've had my on HTPC for a couple of years now and I was curious to see how what I had learned over that time would compare.

I agree with everyone else that the tuner was a very bad choice. I, myself, am using two PVR250's and a Vbox OTA. I am eagerly waiting on nVidia so I can replace the 250's.

I do think the Turion is an interesting choice. I’ll have to look into that. Currently I have an Athlon64 3000 passively cooled by a Scythe Ninja.

The video card is a bit of overkill. A passively cooked 6600 would have been plenty IMO (and silent). As far as the TFT resolution issue, I'm not sure why you couldn't get it to work. I have done a case mod some time ago that use a 5" LCD in the case that was a clone of my main video. The main screen was 1024x768 and the LCD ran at 640x480. Windows had no problem with that. The only catch was the LCD did a pan-and-scan. I know that's not what you would have wanted either, but it does work.

I have a similar Asus mobo, the K8N-E Deluxe, which s AGP and PCI. A little outdated, but have plenty of PCI expansion and a passively cooled chipset (seeing a pattern here?).

I would have liked to have seen some more storage as well. A couple of 300GB+ drives would have been a better touch for the price.

Overall, I don’t think the component choices were necessarily bad. It’s that they are bad given the price of the package. In any case, thanks for the review. It was an enjoyable read.

Edit: I also wanted to mention the sound card issue. I have a BlueGears HDA Mystique card. It has built in Dolby Digital Live so all Windows sounds and games can be output over the digital interface to your receiver as well. So, there is no need to those antiquated analog cables. Just a little FYI.
 
Because the Mobile processor runs much cooler then a standard desktop CPU which means that it's better for an even quieter system which is what you want in an HTPC. This was a great choice of Voodoo and suprised the hell out of me.
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I understand that, but is this an HTPC? or is it a Media PC? If you were really worried about quiet you would go with a passively cooled 6600. But a 7800GTX games better, so you sacrifice noise for better gameplay. Which in the end suits your purpose. So maybe I'm questioning their design? In the end because this really isn't an HTPC an X2 would make more sense, because you could take advantage of dual cores. IMO an active media center pc screams for dual cores. And how much more noise would an X2 make if cooled by that XP120? I'm betting that the noise level isn't going to be all that different when it matters. Because I can guarantee you that when your playing Quake 4 or FEAR the noise created by the whine of your fans at max isn't going to overcome the 1000 watts of noise coming out your(actually mine) receiver and 5.1 speakers. Heat could be another issue but what is the difference between that mobile cpu and an X2 when your playing FEAR?
 
popgoestheweasel said:
Heat could be another issue but what is the difference between that mobile cpu and an X2 when your playing FEAR?
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Probably about 75W of heat, if one is 110W dual core and one is a 35W mobile chip. Considering the casefans are minimal and slow-moving, a dual core cpu would probably turn it into a mini-oven.

Just a couple of comments: Unfortunately, hardware decoding cards don't switch channels quickly. Or rather, the channel change occurs almost instantly, but then the video feed is written to the HD and then read back from there to the display. Try watching the same channel on your PC and your TV... there will be ~2 sec delay from one to the other because of the streaming process... and that's your channel-changing delay. Not much that can be done about it without maybe having a dedicated or onboard ram buffer to stream to initially. Anyway, not currently available.

As for the LCD, it seems like it's either a driver issue or that specific video card... I have also had my monitors display higher than the selected resolution, just panning around to see it all. There's no good reason that shouldn't work for the touchscreen, even if a little annoying, it would only be a minor difference in resolution anyway, yes?
 
The LCD pannels native resolution is 1024x768. When I set them up I put it at that and 60hz. To my knowledge the touchscreen configuration would run on that screen when it is used as a desktop extention, and then you can use the extention while media center is running. I can check this out for sure though.
 
I think the issue with the touchscreen is it uses DVI. Some people are saying that they've gotten small LCDs to work in clone mode, well I think they are likely using one VGA/DVI connection and one Svideo/Composite connection. My TV can't display VGA in PIP, so my htpc is hooked to my TV using both S-Video and VGA in clone mode. If I am watching TV using my Satellite box, I can have the PC displayed via S-Video on the PIP.
In this case though, I bet Windows won't allow two DVI connections to be cloned at different resolutions.
 
I still think it's a driver or hardware limitation, not a windows one. An easy test would be to swap in an ATi card and see if it'll let you run them at different resolutions in clone mode... though for two displays with different resolutions, maybe spanning is better? That's what I used when I was running a 19" at 1280x960 and a 15" at 1024x768. Sure, you'll have to drag the programs you want to use from the lcd to the bigscreen, but it's not a huge deal.
 
Actually it's a know problem with the LCD used that was suppose to have been fixed a while back or atleast thats what Orign AE said they would.
jebo_4jc said:
I think the issue with the touchscreen is it uses DVI. Some people are saying that they've gotten small LCDs to work in clone mode, well I think they are likely using one VGA/DVI connection and one Svideo/Composite connection. My TV can't display VGA in PIP, so my htpc is hooked to my TV using both S-Video and VGA in clone mode. If I am watching TV using my Satellite box, I can have the PC displayed via S-Video on the PIP.
In this case though, I bet Windows won't allow two DVI connections to be cloned at different resolutions.
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ianken said:
I'd like to make one final comment, and I hope this won't be taken the wrong way by the [H] dudes. This is my fav tech/pc site. Okay, brown-nosing is over... :)

As HTPC starts to take off more nad more into the mianstream, I see sites like [H] and others doing HTPC tech reviews. Their weakness is they are not (yet) skilled in evaulating things like de-interlacing perfromance, scaling and video fidelity in general. Years of experience reviewing hardware based on things like fill-rate and texture pipes doesn't translate well. I recently read a review of the x1900 AIW on another that claimed it can pass all of the HQV benchmark patterns for cadence detection. I am skeptical and as soon as I get one will evaluate it.

Some advice to the [H] dudes and anyone else interested in really understanding how to evaluate video:

Pick up copies of

"Avia guide to home theater"
"HQV DVD Becnhmark"
"Microsoft WHQL DVD Test Annex," including the "Rosetta Stone Rate Control" reference disc.
"Digital Video Essentials"

Understand how to interpret the test patterns.

Get a copy of the Media Center Diagnostics Kit from microsoft.com, read the docs and understand how to use Softscope.

Anyway, that'd be a good start. There are good books on the topic of video too:

Digital Video Compression by Symes
Digital Video and HDTV by Poynton
Video Demystified by Jack

There are a few others but their titles excape me at the moment.

-Ian
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Thank you, I used to work in the video engineering R&D lab at BOXX Technologies and am familiar with the terms and have some of the tools you mentioned. While using those tools is great for evaluating a video card's ability to do the things you mentioned, it's outside the scope of our Systems Evaluation Program. Those concerns are better left to full video card evaluations, in my opinion.
 
Instead of dropping 80 bucks on the dvi-hdmi cable, check out www.monoprice.com. I picked up a 6 foot cable for 11 bucks witrh shipping. The signal is all digital, so as long as the connections are good, there will be no interfearence like an analog component cable.
 
Projectionist said:
Instead of dropping 80 bucks on the dvi-hdmi cable, check out www.monoprice.com. I picked up a 6 foot cable for 11 bucks witrh shipping. The signal is all digital, so as long as the connections are good, there will be no interfearence like an analog component cable.
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That's a great link, thanks! If someone didn't realize they needed a cable, that's what they'd have to pay from a place like Fry's or Best Buy if they wanted to get up and running that day...
 
monoprice is one of the avsforum sponsors, so you know they're a legit company, and my dealings with them have been positive.
I was in a situtation a few months ago where I was helping a friend build a hometheater, she had a hdtv, got an upconverting dvd player, and the place wanted almost the same price for the hdmi cable.
Voodoo really should have included one, espcecially since it's a htpc. A htpc is usually going to connect to somebody's hdtv and the standard connector is now hdmi, since vid cards don't have that yet, it seems like a no-brainer to have a 10 dollar dvi-hdmi cable when your product costs 3700$ IMHO. :rolleyes:
 
Chris_Morley said:
Thank you, I used to work in the video engineering R&D lab at BOXX Technologies and am familiar with the terms and have some of the tools you mentioned. While using those tools is great for evaluating a video card's ability to do the things you mentioned, it's outside the scope of our Systems Evaluation Program. Those concerns are better left to full video card evaluations, in my opinion.
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I agree with you Chris. However, what I think DOES need to be evaluated in these systems articles is any "tweaks" done by the OEM to improve IQ. When you started talking about how nice the MCE video image was, we all want to know if that high quality image is due only to Purevideo, or if Voodoo has somehow managed to further improve the quality even beyond that. Do you have a way to find out how the Voodoo machine was producing such a good image?
 
I'd like to know more about the mentioned DVD upscaling, is this just Purevideo and the video card or do you actually have an app that does the upscaling like FFDShow (which doesn't work with the MCE DVD player)?


I'd like to know the answer to his question as well.
 
am i off base or could you not use an utility like ultramon to fix the dual display issue?
 
ChiZZad said:
I'd like to know more about the mentioned DVD upscaling, is this just Purevideo and the video card or do you actually have an app that does the upscaling like FFDShow (which doesn't work with the MCE DVD player)?


I'd like to know the answer to his question as well.
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I didn't investigate that issue - I only subjectively tested the final image quality versus my Panasonic S77 DVD player.
 
rhexis said:
am i off base or could you not use an utility like ultramon to fix the dual display issue?
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No you can't, it's an issue with the way the LCD scales images. The Silverstone LC18 is using the fixed LCD so it doesn't have this problem.
 
Chris_Morley said:
I didn't investigate that issue - I only subjectively tested the final image quality versus my Panasonic S77 DVD player.
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I appreciate that, but I would like to know as to why the quality was as good as it was.
 
ChiZZad said:
No reply?
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I don't have an answer for you beyond what I conveyed in the article. If I had to take a GUESS, I would surmise it was the combination of PureVideo and the 7800GTX.
 
Thanks for the response. The reason I was asking was that I am going to build a HTPC whose main funtion is to catalog my DVD collection and I wanted the highest possible quality from it. Thanks again.
 
Chris_Morley said:
Thank you, I used to work in the video engineering R&D lab at BOXX Technologies and am familiar with the terms and have some of the tools you mentioned. While using those tools is great for evaluating a video card's ability to do the things you mentioned, it's outside the scope of our Systems Evaluation Program. Those concerns are better left to full video card evaluations, in my opinion.
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I'd disagree here. This is a Media Center PC, the major feature of which is the ability record and play video. IMHO no evaulation of HTPC system can go without a focus on the ability of the system to capture and render video. With a system like this it's an end to end thing. You can have the uberest GPU in there with the best deinterlacing ability but if the tuner blows...well you get the idea.
 
ianken said:
I'd disagree here. This is a Media Center PC, the major feature of which is the ability record and play video. IMHO no evaulation of HTPC system can go without a focus on the ability of the system to capture and render video. With a system like this it's an end to end thing. You can have the uberest GPU in there with the best deinterlacing ability but if the tuner blows...well you get the idea.
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I believe I mentioned that we had an uberest GPU with excellent DVD and video quality but a lackluster tuner...

But I do appreciate the feedback. If it needs a little more technical analyzing, I will make sure it gets done.
 
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