15. Conclusions

The HP z556 is not the most powerful HTPC you can build or buy, but it is nice looking, reasonably priced and full of great hardware and software features. I was impressed with the sheer quantity of useful and well-labeled I/O options on the back of the z556. There's something to be said for being able to interface directly with your surround sound receiver without the need for 3.5 mm to RCA conversion cables!

The front panels were another highlight. Not only were they helpful and full of appropriate ports and a multi-card reader, they were discretely placed and sturdy. There was no need to go digging for a cable either since HP even went as far as to provide a cable splitter for users who use over the air for both their HD and SD viewing.

As for performance, the benchmarks came back with acceptable scores. But my multitasking tests show that it's probably wise to go easy on the heavy multitasking when watching or time shifting HD recordings. And although it won't game with the best of them, it is capable of playing many current games with slightly lowered resolution, which adds an extra bit of fun to an already decent HTPC.

But of course, it's not perfect. It has its quirks like the eight logos permanently etched on the front of the case, the occasional loud burst of sound from the CPU fan and the fact that the CPU cooler vent is on top of the case complicating stacking arrangements. And while 250 GB of drive space is fine, if you decide to transfer your movie collection to the z556 or want to keep a lot of your recorded shows, you're going to need more hard drive space. Unfortunately, due to the lack of internal bays, the additional storage will need to be in the form of the expensive and proprietary Personal Media Drive, external USB or networked forms. I'd also recommend bumping the memory up to at least a gigabyte of RAM since the supplied 512 MB is a bit light, especially considering the multitasking load that can be placed on an HTPC.

So why would anyone put forth the effort to build an HTPC from scratch when the z556 offers instant gratification, great looks, loads of features and can be bought for less money than I spent on my $1600 DIY machine? The basic reasons boil down to minimizing fan noise and expandability. My system runs consistently quieter than the z556 due to its use of an Athlon 64 3700+ single core processor, Zalman cooler and passively cooled ATI Radeon X550GE graphics card. Without a small fan cooling the graphics card, my system is also likely to stay quiet while the z556 will get noisier over time as the fan bearings wear out.

And when the fan does wear out, your options for fixing it will be limited by the riser card and output panel cabling requirements in the z556. So although my larger Silverstone case can't approach the sophisticated look of the z556's, it gives me more wiggle room for component selection and substitution. My larger case also has the capacity to hold seven 3.5" hard drives vs. the z556's one, making for less expensive storage expansion.

But the largest difference between the DIY route and an off-the-shelf HTPC is in the amount of time invested. It took me years to figure out the best way to build an HTPC to meet my needs, while the z556 is a great HTPC solution with a decent set of features that can be humming away in your home theater in the time it takes to whip out your credit card.

At the beginning of this article, I stated that I normally wouldn't consider buying an off-the-shelf HTPC. Although that statement still rings true, after taking a good hard look at the HP z556, I can honestly say that I would definitely recommend it to anyone as a great and affordable alternative to rolling your own - even if you are an obsessive and controlling HTPC builder like me.

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