Home Theater PC Hardware Showdown: The new Mac Mini versus a PC hardware build
Posted by: Atkins in Hardware, tags: blu-ray, h.264, Hardware, home theater, linux, mac mini, media center, os x, pc, vdpau, windows 7, xbmcHDTV’s are awesome. Watching HD video on HDTVs is even more awesome. Playing HD mkv files with anything other than a home theater pc (htpc) is not awesome. About a month ago I moved my desktop PC in to my living room and gave it HTPC duties. It served it’s purpose well but I’d like to reclaim it so I can do some after hours coding on a side project. Apple recently released an upgraded Mac Mini and it appears to be quite a capable HD media center device. The entry price for a Mac Mini is $599 and before I purchased one I decided it was due diligence to see what the same $599 could get me on the PC side. Here is what I was able to put together.
hec Black 7K09 Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case $48.99
GIGABYTE GA-E7AUM-DS2H Micro ATX Intel Motherboard $119.99
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor $164.99
CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 $44.99
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000333AS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $89.99
SAMSUNG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model SH-S223Q $24.99
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner / Encoder 1229 $109.99
The total here is $603.93 and includes everything needed to build a complete HTPC. Below is a comparison of this machine and a Mac Mini.
 |
VS |
 |
| $599 Mac Mini | $603.93 Custom PC | |
| Processor | 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo | 3.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo |
| L2 cache | 3MB | 6MB |
| System bus | 1066MHz | 1333MHz |
| Memory | 1GB of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM, 4GB Max | 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM, 16GB Max |
| Hard Drive | 120GB Serial ATA 5400 rpm | 1TB Serial ATA 7200 rpm |
| Optical Drive | Slot-loading 8x SuperDrive | 22x DVD+/-R, 16x Dual Layer |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 128MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory | NVIDIA GeForce 9400 hybrid SLI |
| Video out | mini-DVI output; VGA output (using optional adapter); Mini DisplayPort | HDMI, DVI-D, VGA |
| Audio out | Built-in speaker, combined optical digital audio input/audio line in, combined optical digital audio output/headphone out | Realtek ALC889A codec, High Definition Audio, 2/4/5.1/7.1 Channel, Dolby Home Theater Support, S/PDIF in/out |
| TV Tuner | None | Dual input ATSC / ClearQAM / NTSC plus a FM tuner |
| USB, Firewire and eSATA | 5 x USB 2.0, 1 x Firewire 800 | 12 x USB 2.0, 2 x Firewire 800,1 x eSATA |
| Networking | Gigabit Ethernet, Built-in AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi (802.11n), built-in Bluetooth 2.1 | Gigabit Ethernet |
| Mass | 2 inches x 6.5 inches x 6.5 inches, 2.9 pounds | 3.9 inches x 13.8 inches x 14.5 inches, ~10 pounds |
| Operating System | Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard | Windows 7 Beta 7000 (Free for now) |
Analysis: The Mac Mini lacks HDMI output. You would need to run a DVI cable to your TV and an optical audio cable to your amplifier. This requires a separate optical TOSLink cable. With this cable the Mac Mini outputs 5.1 surround sound but is unable to do 7.1 or DTS audio.
Another concern with the Mini is the cpu speed. The 2.0GHz Cure 2 Duo chip will not be able to decode Blu-ray and high bitrate h.264 video without dropping a significant number of frames. There are ways to make HD playback work. The 9400M gpu can easily handle HD video decoding but you need to have the proper software. In Windows, you need NVIDIA’s pure video HD package installed for gpu acceleration in windows media player. You could also pick up PowerDVD which does very nice gpu accelerated playback of all video except mkv files. Seriously PowerDVD what the fuck. Unfortunately, the Windows version of XBMC (my personal favorite htpc application) does not support gpu accelerated playback at this time.
In Linux the VDPAU libraries recently released by NVIDIA do a good job of gpu HD video decoding. Most of the major Linux apps, VLC, MythTV, Xine, MPlayer and XBMC have preliminary support for VDPAU now. A Mac Mini running Ubuntu, via Boot Camp, would be a good choice to take full advantage of the Mini’s hardware.
I’m not an OS X expert but I’m going to assume that the Apple engineers have enabled gpu video acceleration within OS X. Long story short, If the Mini can use its gpu for video playback, it’s in the clear. If not, then 1080p video and Blu-ray is going to look shitty. The 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo chip in the PC box is fast enough to decode Blu-ray video along with other high bitrate h.264 videos. The faster cpu gives you a lot more flexibility when you choose your OS and media playing applications.
The PC also has a TV tuner card so you can use MythTV or MediaPortal to turn your box in to a fully featured digital video recorder.
If you’re interested in saving money you could save about $100 on the PC cpu and get Core 2 Duo at around 2.0GHz. You could also lose the TV tuner for another $100 of savings. Finally you could save an additional $50 by getting a 250G hard drive instead of a terabyte hard drive. This would put the total cost of the PC around $350 and would still be a little better hardware than the Mac Mini.
When it comes down to it, you pay Apple for the OS and the form factor. The Mac Mini looks pretty sweet. It’s quiet and uses less power than a PC build. OS X is a solid operating system with some very nice features. For me, virtualization on OS X is amazing. In a perfect world, I’d surround myself with Macs running VMWare Fusion 2.0 and I’d be knee deep in OS X, Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04. In this world, I need HDMI output, DTS sound, Blu-ray and h.264 decoding so I’ll stick with the PC hardware.
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that is a pretty spankin build you got there — that socket is great for upgradability, you can upgrade to the better 775 processors when they go down in price.
800MHz RAM can be a huge bottleneck though – that will pretty much nullify the performance gains at the processor bus level – you might want to try to find something that at least supports 1066 DDR2 (though i feel DDR2 is going the way of the dinosaur soon, since DDR3 is so much faster…) – the difference is GIGANTIC!
my friend has a macbook pro with DDR2 at 800MHz and a 7200RPM drive with a 2.0GHz c2d (it’s essentially the same machine but on the older santa rosa platform with an arguably better video card and faster drive) — their xbench score was was 107 and my mini was 142 (even before i upgraded to a 7200 RPM drive! — the mini spanked it in all the math and gui tests…)
the RAM’s bus is especially important when doing very GPU heavy work (H.264 encoding is about as punishing as it gets…)
i saw a few ASROCK boards with pretty great specs for pretty cheap — i had an ASROCK (it’s actually built by rosewill — they make boards for everyone — apple and dell and so on) in my old AMD socket a machine and it didn’t give me a problem for 5 years (i actually just sold it a few months ago)
Also, if you’re gonna run Windows 7 (Vista SP3
) the better 64-bit multi-core processor support would probably show better performance gains if you went for a slightly slower quad instead of the duo.
Vista sucks at duo support (from what i’ve seen on my laptop it essentially runs them both as a single processor) — but i know debian/ubuntu has pretty solid multi-core support and if win 7 is as good as they say it will be at handling it — then you’d be good to go with the quad insofar as speed boosts…
something like this – http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115055
i’ve been trying to maintain a 3 platform set up at home with linux, OS X and Windows — so i’ve been doing a silly amount of work on trying to fine tune the systems to work together… i should really go outside and enjoy this weather, eh?
All in all, i think you’ve got yourself a pretty great setup for a multimedia machine — it’s pretty nutty how much hardware you can put together for a few hundred bucks and some arctic silver
I’m using the previous generation of Mac Mini (bought about 6 months before the latest update was announced), with Plex (the Mac OSX XBMC fork) and it plays HD-DVD rips just fine. It’s not definitive, but it hints toward the fact that Blu-Ray rips would play fine as well. I should say that these rips have VC-1 video and not H264, I’m not sure how that affects things.
On my PC, I rip the HD-DVD, convert the TrueHD audio to DTS, and remux the video without re-encoding, all to an MKV container. This goes onto a wired NAS that the PC and Mac both see. The Mac does output DTS over TOSLink to my receiver. For the video I use the VGA port on my TV, which is not the best option but sometimes the TV wouldn’t see the HDMI signal if I used a DVI-to-HDMI cable.
So it’s great that the PC works as a more powerful and affordable option, but I wanted to say that a Mac Mini is perfectly powerful solution for 1080p video and DTS audio.
@Foambullet: I’ve been reading conflicting things about the Mac Mini’s ability to do DTS over the TOSLink cable, do you have any link or sources that you can share? I’d like to get to the bottom of that and correct my post if needs be.
Also can you tell us what the video bitrate of your VC-1 files are? I think that dual core chips running around 2.0GHz can do a good job of decoding h.264 bitrates in the 5-6Mbps neighborhood. It’s the high bitrate files, 9-11Mbps, that need the extra power. My desktop had an old 939 series AMD Athlon X2 4200+, which is a 2.2GHz cpu and it played all the 720p rips fine but started choking on certain scenes in 1080p rips. It didn’t look terrible and 1080p video would look great 85-90% of the time. Certain scenes, with lots of data, would drop a lot of frames.
Check out some of your files and let us know what those bitrates are.
i’ve seen conflicting accounts of whether the new mini (core2 duo) will play HD content (1080i & 1080p). Say the HD content is h.264, 1080i – will the new mini play it with DTS with mythtvfrontend (running OSX)?
I’m on the hunt for a nice little frontend box – the mini fits the profile i want perfectly (size, power consumption) but it’s amazingly hard to find a definitive “I have it working with mythfrontend on OSX” post.. from anyone, anywhere. Some people say the video memory is too small for VDPAU, etc. etc… I can’t even find out if the mythfrontend for OSX does VDPAU!
No wonder I’m balding…
I was convinced when I saw the eagle. I didn’t even bother to read the specs of the two computers.
Turns out HD playback on a stock 2.0GHz core 2 duo mini with 4GB RAM works fine under OS X with the latest(ish) build of mythfrontend for OS X.
On thing I noticed when I read reviews on the Newegg site for your build was the noise was a “little high”. For me personally I really want a dead quite Media Center. If it means buying a mini and installing Vista then so be it. I can’t stand fan noise in my media room.
Thoughts or other build part suggestions?
@Chuck I also saw the reviews that said the power supply fan in the htpc case was noisy but here is what I’ve noticed. The combination of the CPU and PSU running at high load is still quieter than my xbox 360 at idle (without a dvd in either drive). If either system has a spun up DVD in the drive then they are pretty loud. The HTPC 22x DVD drive is noticibly louder than the xbox 360 dvd drive which runs at 12x. The HTPC certainly isn’t silent, but it’s inaudible to me once I’m about 5 feet away from it whereas I can hear my 360 when I sit on my couch about 12 feet away. The system was actually quieter than I expected but it’s not silent. Passive cooling is your only option for that and you would need a custom power supply and a new cpu cooling solution.
Also, if anyone has a new mac mini, can you try playing a 1080p mkv and seeing if/how many frames get dropped at high bit rates? If you check out this link, http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php?s=f625944e1c867f0a1cfad658338557d9&showtopic=3029&st=0&p=20362&#entry20362 there are a ton of sample mkv files going from 20mbit to 42mbit. From everything I’ve read and heard, mac mini’s do a great, if not perfect, job of 720p playback which is probably due to it using it’s gpu to decode the video. If the gpu can handle high bitrate, 1080p video, then thats a big plus for the mini. Also, I heard some co-worker talking about an optional adapter that you can get which will give you a HDMI output. I haven’t verified that, anyone have links?
Well researched site! Can you recommend any forums I could join to learn more? Thanks
I wanted to add your site to my feed reading software, but it gives me an error. Can you suggest a tutorial on how to do it?
This is why open source is the way to go. XBMC is a fine example of that