MCE TV Tuner Roundup: Featuring ATI's Theater 550 & NVIDIA's NVTV

The Platform

Not everyone is looking to build their own MCE box, and luckily, prices have come down tremendously on pre-built MCE machines.  For this review, we had a chance to play around with WinBook's PowerSpec MCE 410 - a $999 MCE 2005 system (after $200 mail-in rebate). 

The system is configured with a Pentium 4 530 (3.0GHz), 512MB of DDR400, ATI X300SE, a 160GB hard drive and a 16X dual layer burner, all on a FIC 915G motherboard. 

The case of the MCE 410 is a little too shiny for our tastes, but still very subtle and it looks quite at home in your home theater.  We would've preferred something with a matte finish or maybe even something with a silver/aluminum finish, but the MCE 410 is one of the nicer looking systems out there. 

A jog dial controls the volume

Front mounted card reader...

...and front mounted USB/Firewire/audio ports

Because of the low profile, the MCE 410 can't really function as a gaming box - you can only install low profile graphics cards, which limits you to the X300 class of GPUs at this point.  Thanks to a riser card, you can install two normal height PCI cards, but they can't be longer than about 6.5"; otherwise, they will interfere with the DVD drive. 

Low profile X300

The performance of the Pentium 4 530 is more than acceptable for an MCE machine. The program guide is quite fast and responsive and we didn't have any hiccups during our use of the system. 

Quite possibly one of the biggest attractions to the system is the fact that it relies on a single fan, the power supply fan, to cool the entire system (including the CPU).  Because of this, the Samsung SpinPoint HDD is the loudest component in the system - which, for the most part, means it's pretty quiet and you get absolutely no fan noise.

Also priced at $999, WinBook offers a 30" LCD TV with a 1280 x 768 native resolution.  WinBook sent us the display to try out with the system, and while we thought that the panel itself was decent, our biggest problem with it was its native resolution.  At 1280 x 768, there's inherently a small amount of scaling for 720p content, which isn't desirable for the role of a LCD TV. 

Now, you have an idea of our test platform. Although, a custom built MCE box would do just fine as well, so let's get to the contenders...