5. How And What We Tested

We ran this build through the following battery of benchmarks:

PCMark05 to get a sense of its overall computing power and capabilities

3DMark05 to get a sense of its graphics handling capabilities

HQV (Hollywood Quality Video Processing for HD) Benchmark to test picture quality on our systems, especially for high definition output.

Thanks to a visit from a couple of very capable Intel engineers, we finally figured out how to get DHCAT working on our Media Center PCs. But it still takes too much time to grind through the whole process for us to fit it into this fast and furious series of pieces. We plan to follow up soon with a DHCAT story that walks readers through the trials and travails involved in making it work, and then to provide benchmark data from that test battery for these System Builder Marathon systems, as well as for the system in our previous DIY HDMI PC story.

Once the formal benchmarking was completed, we viewed HDTV broadcasts using the AVerMedia AverTV HD MCE A180 HDTV tuner card. For standard benchmarks, we used a 17" 1280x1024 Viewsonic LCD monitor. For viewing HDTV video content, we used a Dell 2407WFP monitor with an HDMI port.

Benchmarks And Results

We’ll describe the benchmarks we run one at a time, followed by the results from this test build for that benchmark, along with conclusions we drew from those results, plus any observations we made along the way. We’ve been running some of these benchmarks (or variants thereof) long enough that these observations are sometimes more interesting than the conclusions we draw from the results.

PCMark05

PCMark05 is a set of synthetic benchmarks that simulate various kinds of workloads for PCs to tackle. Though these ratings do not necessarily reflect real-life performance, they do provide a useful basis for comparing across multiple systems, such as the four builds we put together for this story.

In the table that follows, we report the measurement for overall performance (called PCMarks, a common mechanism for comparing and one-upping systems on the Web), CPU, Memory, Graphics, HDD, audio compression and video encoding, all of which have some bearing on media PC behavior. We provide the information for our test system (an AMD 4600+) along with the results for four other, better-equipped but more expensive systems from our recent HDMI DIY article.

What we like about these results, of course, are the scores for CPU, Memory and HDD. What we don’t like, and what accounts for the much lower showing for the current 4600+ test build, is the graphics performance, which is relatively dismal when compared to any of the others (all of which used the same HDMI-equipped Asus EN7600GT graphics card).

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