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The American Megatrends bios is a fully featured ‘no frills' configuration, although we would assume that the majority of people buying this system will never need to even touch it as everything is configured ‘out of the box'.
As this system is passively cooled, there is no need to manually configure or tweak fan parameters in the bios.
The Arctic Cooling MC001-BD Entertainment Center is built around the Intel ATOM D525 processor, which is a dual core design which operates at 1.8ghz. It is built on the 45nm process and has 512k of Level 2 cache. Onboard graphics are supplied by the ATI Mobility HD5430 GPU which has 80 unifed shaders and 512MB of GDDR3 memory via a 64 bit memory interface. The core is clocked to 500mhz and the memory operates at 800mhz. While the memory is branded 1333mhz, the bios speeds are limited to 800mhz with 6-6-6-15 timings at 1T.
The Windows Experience Index is not the most exhaustive of test results, but we try to include it when possible as a point of interest, and topic of conversation. The overall score is limited to 3.5 by the ATOM processor, otherwise it would score 4.9.
The system automatically pre-configures setup on first boot which will take around 10 minutes. Above, an image of the installed applications right after initial startup. It is a clean configuration with no ‘crap ware' installed, just essential drivers and tools.
Arctic Cooling are using the 32 bit version of Windows 7 for the MC001-BD, which is a surprising decision. They claim on their webpage that “The 32 bit Windows consumes fewer resources and offers lower loading time than its 64 bit counterpart while performing at the same level for most applications.” We can't say that we agree and with 4GB of memory installed it would make more sense to the use the 64 bit version of Windows 7. They are using software which utilises the memory above 3.25GB as a ‘cache' system.
PCMark Vantage
PCMark 7
Cinebench 11.5 64 bit
FRAPS Professional
CrystalDiskMark
HD Tach
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 11
HQV Benchmark 2.0
Cyberlink MediaEspresso
Call Of Duty: Black Ops
Dead Space 2
Dirt 3
Left4Dead2
Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Lacie 730 Monitor (Image Quality testing)
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Kill A Watt Meter
Nikon D3X SLR, 60mm Nikon Lens with R1C1 Kit (4 flashes)
Panasonic Lumix TZ10
No fans. id live with the lowish performance for that. looks quite nice too. Id best get entering the competition!
This is purely for media and it works. win for me. I wouldnt buy it for gaming.
No noise would be great. my girlfriend hates fans and this is quite nice looking. Its a bit bigger than the actively cooled media centers, but that is quite a heatsink over the CPU/GPU area.
the two tone colour system is odd. Not sure if that would grow on me. you reckon its meant to allow people to ‘pick’ their favourite colour and to rotate it to suit in a living room?
32 bit Windows 7? what a weird choice. the caching idea is unusual too. id rather have 64 bit and the memory for windows.
seems like a good enough deal, but id want my media center with a bit more grunt. not core i7, but something more capable.
Nice idea however, its a great idea for them to produce something which doesnt make noise. Many people will embrace this.
Its passive, I can forgive a few of the mistakes I think they made with this, just for that. because its extremely difficult to do.
I like the two tone idea, not sure its the prettiest looking media center, but its noiseless and has a bluray drive.
I like my PS3 however for media, but a PC would be better overall for the codec support…..
I’m sort of surprised that they build a really capable system and then slapped in an Intel Atom and Windows7 32-bit. Maybe its just me but I think that they could have gotten something better as far as the processor goes and still kept the beast silent. All in all though it seems like a good idea.
Thanks for the review, this looks like an interesting product. One thing I’m worried about is heat. The temperatures for CPU and GPU looked pretty high, and I wonder what the temperature of the device itself is, and how high it can reach if the room is at 30c+.
I have to wonder why they didn’t use an AMD E-350, though. Is the Atom + GPU combination lower power or provides more features?
By the way, I’m sure I said it before, but the “view all pages” option is a great feature of KitGuru reviews, and I wish more sites had it.
ET,
I have to agree with you on this. I want to know why they didn’t use an AMD APU for this build. The only thing that I can come up with is perhaps they were offered a significantly cheaper solution with the Atom and they took that route in an effort to keep pricing to a minimum.
maybe not that bad to have the 32bits, the D525 only can address 4GB anyway, and with all the issues I met with the 64bits, I am actually happy that they use the 32bits.
It should as well speed up the boot