MaximumPC 2006 01

reviewsTESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

S

1 Digital’s sexy-looking Media Center

Platinum Edition—which is available, for

the record, in either black or silver—will

look right at home next to your home-enter-

tainment gear. Whether this extra-deep PC will

fit into your home-entertainment center is a

whole other question.

Measuring 15 inches wide, the Ahanix

MCE601 case that S1 Digital chose to house

this system is about the same width as most

home-theater com-

ponents. But mea-

suring 18 inches

deep, the case will

extend three or

more inches further

into your cabinet

than the average

A/V receiver. You’ll

also need to take

into account S1

Digital’s location

requirements: There

must be a minimum

of two inches of

airflow clearance

above the case; and if you place the unit in a

cabinet, the back must be entirely open.

The case houses a conventional ATX

motherboard (an Intel D945PVS, to be precise),

and if you stand the unit on its side (as we did

in the photo to display its internal organs), its

profile looks just like a mid-tower case. There’s

a double-layer DVD burner and a media-card

reader stacked in front of the motherboard on

the right, and a 3.5-inch hard drive bay in front

of the motherboard on the left.

Media mavens with burgeoning music and

movie libraries will appreciate the two vacan-

cies in that drive bay, although it’s an open

question as to whether or not the case’s twin

6cm fans would be able to provide adequate

cooling. The exhaust

fans—which are

quiet, but by no

means silent—are

located about as far

as they can be from

the drive bay. The

Nexus PHT-7750

CPU heatsink/fan

combo, on the other

hand, whirred along

while producing

almost no noise at

all—not bad consid-

ering that it’s tasked

with cooling a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 640 (with its

hot-as-magma Prescott core).

S1 Digital offers a very limited number of

options, but the stock machine comes with just

about everything you could want in a media-

center PC, including a dual-tuner Hauppauge

PVR-500MCE card for standard-definition TV

and FM radio, and a single FusionHDTV5 tuner

card for over-the-air high-definition TV broad-

casts (you’ll need a $40 antenna).

The system also comes with 1GB of

memory, a 320GB Western Digital SATA hard

drive, Gigabit Ethernet on the mobo, and an

802.11b/g LAN card in one of the PCI slots.

The media-card reader is hidden behind a

drop-down panel and handles just about

every flash memory standard you can think of,

including SD, xD, CompactFlash, Microdrive,

and Memory Stick. You’ll also find two USB

2.0 ports and a FireWire port conveniently

located in the hidden bay.

The Platinum Edition performance was

pathetic compared with our zero-point rigs.

The system’s nVidia GeForce 6600 GT cer-

tainly won’t float hardcore gamers’ boats (S1

Digital does include nVidia’s otherwise optional

PureVideo decoder). But let’s face it: There’s

no simple way to build a dead-quiet PC that

delivers tremendous performance, while main-

taining the rig in a formfactor that seamlessly

blends into a home-theater system. Judged by

those criteria, our biggest knocks against this

system are that it’s more than a bit portly and

a trifle loud.

—MICHAEL BROWN

S1 Digital Media Center

This living room rig looks good in basic black

The presence of a GeForce 6600 GT, a dual-tuner standard-defi-

nition TV card, an HDTV tuner card, and an 802.11b/g LAN card

leaves just one open PCI slot on this ATX mobo.

S1 Digital’s Media
Center Platinum Edition
is available in black or
silver to match your hi-fi
components—just make
sure it will fit in your
entertainment center
before ordering one.

$2,500, http://www.s1digital.com

S1 DIGITAL MEDIA CENTER

GLORIA SWANSON

Equipped with just about

every media device you can

think of.

SWANSON TV DINNER^8

Big case won’t fit in some

entertainment centers;

not quiet enough.

74 MA XIMUMPC JANUARY 2006

CPU Intel Pentium 4 (3.2GHz,

2MB L2)

MOBO Intel D945PVS (Intel 945P

Express Chipset)

RAM 1GB Geil DDR2-533 (two

512MB sticks)

LAN Gigabit LAN (Intel Pro/1000

PM), Gigabyte GN-WPKG

802.11b/g Wireless Card

HARD DRIVE One 320GB Western Digital

WD3200JD (7200rpm SATA)

OPTICAL NEC ND-3540A DVD+/-RW

(double-layer)

VIDEOCARD nVidia GeForce 6600 GT, 128MB

(500MHz core, 500MHz DDR3)

SOUNDCARDIntel HD Audio (with Dolby

Digital Live)

CASE Ahanix MCE601 with Ahanix

MPD-350T 350W PSU

UNDER THE HOOD

BOOT: 49 sec. DOWN:37 sec.

BRAINS

BEAUTY

169 (-15.92%)

581 sec

377 sec (-24.14%)

2149 (-15.68%)

19 fps (-75.36%)

BENCHMARKS

SYS mark 2004 201

ZERO POINT SCORES

Premiere Pro 620 sec

Photoshop CS 286 sec

Divx Encode 1812 sec

3D Mark 05 29.3 fps

Doom 3 77. 1 fps

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Our zero-point reference system uses a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-55, 2GB of DDR400 Crucial Ballistix RAM, two nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in SLI, a Maxtor 250GB DiamondMax10, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, a PC Power and Cooling TurboCool 510 Deluxe Express, and Windows XP Pro with SP2.

10.45 fps (-64.33%)