7. The A/V Experience

The biggest reason for using HDMI is, of course, to gain access to high-definition DVD formats such as Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD. But because we didn’t include either of these elements in our system build, the only high-definition workout for this test system came from watching high-definition TV through the AverMedia TVHD card.

That experience was acceptable, though we did notice the regular presence of edge artifacts in fast motion scenes that we didn’t see in the DIY HDMI machines that had more capable graphics subsystems. Nevertheless, video quality was acceptable, and you’d have to be something of a videophile to notice the nits we found to pick with the signals we decoded and displayed.

The truth is that watching video, even when some decoding is necessary to handle the image display, is not as demanding as the 3D games from which other benchmarks so often get their most important graphics information. For watching video, the HQV benchmarks tell the overall story better than 3DMark and help to put the low graphics score in PCMark05 into its proper context.

On To The Next Build

Tomorrow, we’ll turn the tables on the cost equation and put a much more powerful Media PC together. Expect performance and ratings to rise with the sticker price! In our third and final day of coverage on this topic, we’ll summarize what we saw and learned, and make some recommendations as to how one might make best use of the various systems involved, and we’ll show you some photographs of how these two builds turned out.

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