HardwareCentral - PowerSpec MCE410 and WinBook LC32 LCD HDTV Review.

PowerSpec MCE410 and WinBook LC32 LCD HDTV Review

A Capable Computer

June 21, 2005
By Eric Grevstad

A Capable Computer

The MCE410 measures roughly 16.5 by 17 by 4 inches, with a handsome black front panel set off by glowing blue light around a big silver audio-volume knob and a blue LCD panel that shows info such as TV channel, CD track number, and DVD running time (and spells out "PowerSpec Media Center" at startup).

The Samsung/Toshiba optical drive -- which offers 16X DVD+R, 12X DVD-R, 4X DVD±RW, and 2.4X double-layer DVD+R recording plus DVD-ROM playback and 40/32/48X CD-RW performance -- occupies the lone front-accessible 5.25-inch bay, just as a 160GB, 7,200 rpm Samsung Serial ATA hard disk fills the only internal 3.5-inch bay.

Behind two front panels -- one of which you pull and one of which you push to open -- you'll find slots for a flash-card reader; play, pause, stop, reverse, forward, and record buttons for CDs or DVDs; and two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, mic and S/PDIF audio inputs, and an audio output jack.

Around the back are PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports; parallel, serial, four more USB, one more FireWire, and Ethernet ports; RCA stereo in/out jacks; coaxial and optical S/PDIF out jacks; and line and mic in, line out, and center, rear, and side audio mini jacks. The 64MB ATI Radeon X300 SE graphics card provides DVI and S-Video output, while the AVerMedia M150 TV tuner card supplies S-Video, RCA stereo, TV cable, and FM antenna inputs.

Removing three small screws lets you pop the top and admire the FIC motherboard, based on Intel's 915P chipset. The half-height ATI card occupies the lone PCI Express x16 slot, leaving two half-height PCI slots vacant; a third holds a riser card that provides two horizontal, full-height PCI slots, one for the TV tuner and one vacant.

There's free access to the expansion slots and not-so-free access to the four DIMM sockets, two of which account for the system's 512MB of PC3200 DDR memory. A 250-watt power supply hides in the corner.

Entertaining, Not Gaming

Hidden under a heat sink -- and cooled by a fan that's a little louder than we'd like for the living room, but that doesn't come on too often -- is the CPU, Intel's 32-bit, single-core-but-Hyper-Threading Pentium 4 530 (3.0GHz). It's one of the 90-nanometer-process "Prescott" chips with 800MHz front-side bus and 1MB of Level 2 cache.

Teamed with the dual-channel DDR400 and speedy Serial ATA hard disk, it delivers performance matching, well, other 3.0GHz systems we've tested, with snappy application loads, smooth DVD playback, and upper-middle-class benchmark numbers. Examples are a FutureMark PCMark04 score of 4,118 (CPU 4,511; memory 4,721; hard disk 4,029; graphics 1,179) and BAPco SysMark 2004 Internet Content Creation rating of 185.

Compared to the relatively speedy processor, the Radeon X300 SE graphics card yields relatively tame frame rates -- adequate for older games (112 XGA frames per second in Quake III Arena, 35 in Wolfenstein Enemy Territory) but uncompetitive, despite its DirectX 9.0 support, for more demanding 3D (16 fps in AquaMark3 with a graphics score of 1,797; 10 fps in Gun Metal 2; a 3DMark05 score of 575).

This fits the Media Center PC customer profile of TV and DVD viewing, not avid gaming. Similarly, hardcore home-theater buffs will wish for a hi-fi sound card instead of the PowerSpec's AC97 motherboard audio, though we found the sound perfectly sufficient for watching TV and DVDs.

We do, as mentioned, have a bone to pick with the PowerSpec's strictly generic PS/2 keyboard and mouse. It's not such a big deal that the former lacks multimedia keys for such functions as audio volume and play/pause/next track/previous track; the MCE410 has an infrared remote control and front-panel buttons for those. But in this day and age there's no excuse for shipping a cheap, old-fashioned mechanical instead of optical mouse. And again, a living-room instead of den or desktop PC clearly needs a wireless keyboard and mouse to accompany its wireless remote.

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