8. 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 current 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 systems, as well as for the previous DIY HDMI PC story.

Once the formal benchmarking was completed, we viewed chapters from several DVDs on each system, to observe picture and audition sound quality. Titles included "Open Season" (Blu-ray), "XMen: The Last Stand" (Blu-ray), "Swordfish" (HD-DVD) and "The Bourne Supremacy" (HD-DVD). We also played back conventional DVD versions of all chapters viewed to establish a basis for comparison. For regular testing, we used a 17" 1280x1024 Viewsonic LCD monitor; for viewing video content, especially HDTV, we used a Dell 2407WFP monitor with HDMI input.

A/V Components
Receiver	Sony STR-DA5200ES A/V Receiver (Retail: $1,100) HDMI input from PC, HDMI output to HDTV/Dell 2407
Loudspeakers	2x Phase Technology PC500s (Retail: $2,000) 1x Phase Technology PC1 Center (Retail: $700) 2x Phase Technology PC2 Rear (Retail: $350)

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.