Home Theatre Computing : MSI MEGA pc

Computing for the final frontier: your living room.

The idea of every house having its own computer has come true. But even though all these wonderful things have been realized the computer has never found a real foothold in the living room.

The computing industry still suffers form the 'great Gray Box' syndrome. In other words: computers are dull boring boxes that don't fit in the living room.

Fortunately someone has wizened up and created a micro systems about the size of a shoe box. And thus a new class of computing was born: Home Theatre Computing

The MEGA, short for MSI Entertainment and Gaming Appliance is what can be called the first true ‘living room’ and Home Theatre computer.

A sleek stylish design that, besides having pretty impressive specs for its size, can also be used as a standalone radio, CD and MP3 player. When a couple of well chosen peripherals are installed in the MEGA chassis it can be used to replace all the audiovisual equipment found in today's living room.

In this review LabDV takes a look at what makes this new class of computers tick, and show what it takes to create a true Home Theatre Computer.

Since this computer is to act as the digital hub of the living room entertainment system the list or requirements is extensive. The idea is to be able to replace all commonly found audiovisual, gaming and other electronic entertainment equipment in the living room by this one connected machine. Here are the requirements of what our Home theatre Computer should be able to do:

Radio
CD/MP3 player
DVD player and recorder
Digital Video recorder with time shifting capability (TiVo capability)
Game station for the kids and young at heart grown-ups
Internet gateway
Multimedia organizer for all your digital video, photo's and MP3 collections
Surround sound with ample power for a rich multimedia experience in both DVD playback and gaming preferably with optical or coaxial link.
Remote control for full control from the comfortable couch.
Wireless LAN and internet access
Have plenty of storage room for all the multimedia
Video editing and recording capabilities to create your home movies.
Connection to our big screen TV via S-video or to a Plasma TV via a DVI interface.
Multimedia interfaces such as USB 2.0 Fire wire, memory card readers etc

All these criteria make it not so easy to fit this in a small footprint. But the MSI MEGA- PC is a rock solid platform for a system that will meet all of our requirements.

The list is pretty extensive and will stress out even the most performant desktop computer. Not so long ago it was nearly impossible to meet all these specs without having a full tower case crammed with hardware. Due to the ever increasing integration of functionality in the PC chipsets it is now possible to make very compact systems.

Still, we will need a couple of extra boards and devices to fulfill all the requirements of the list. Here is what we came up with to match them:

MSI Entertainment and gaming Appliance (MEGA) PC chassis
2.8 GHz Pentium IV CPU for awesome gaming and multimedia experience
1 Gbyte Ram
4x DVD +R +RW CD-R CD-RW recorder / playback: NEC 1300
MSI 5600 256 Meg Video card with VGA, composite and DVI output that has hardware acceleration for Direct-X 9.0
Maxtor 160 Gbyte hard disk for ample storage
MSI TV tuner card with hardware MPEG-2 encoding, time shifting, teletext and radio tuner.
BENQ USB to 802.11b adapter for wireless surfing
Logitech wireless wingman for gaming
Gyration wireless keyboard and gyroscopic mouse for true control from the lazy couch
Windows XP professional
Logitech Z680 THX certified Dolby Surround System with 500W RMS output power.
Various software that makes the hub operation from the couch possible

All these individual components together will form the ‘home theatre computing system’. Let's take a look at these individual components, what we will use them for, and how it all fits together.

Micro Star international or MSI for short is a well known, and one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of motherboards. They have a long and excellent track record and their products have won numerous awards from several prestigious publications and on-line sites.

Besides motherboards they also produce award winning video cards and CD/ DVD drives. They now released the MEGA PC A true David when you compare it to the goliath’s that most other computer cases look like. But don't be misled by its size.

This case and the special MSI motherboard pack more kick then a lot of large systems out there. Built around the well proven SIS 651 / 962 combination chipset with integrated video it sports a number of peripherals and enhancements by MSI that drive the performance up to top notch. Here are some of its features

The 4 USB 2.0 ports are shared between the front and rear panel. Two are in the front panel hidden behind a flip down door, the others are in the back.

The Firewire ports served trough a Realtek controller are also available on the front panel. One 4 pin and one 6 pin allow for easy connection of both camera and storage systems.

A memory card reader that supports 6 different types of cards: Memory stick, smart media, compact flash, secure digital, Micro drive and XD card, is also mounted on the front of the MEGA chassis. This reader ties into an internal USB port on the main board. When a floppy drive is required the Card reader can be removed and then a bay for the floppy drive becomes available.

An additional microphone and headphone connector on the front panel complete the audio interface list. An optical digital audio input completes the front panel connectors.

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