beblu component Media Center system

Set up and performance

To see whether the system could cut it in real-world usage, I was nominated to go and spend a weekend playing with the system back home, to see how it compared to my existing set up.

Set up: The beblu is a piece of cake to set up, physically. It's a case of plugging in the power adaptor, hooking up your TV to one of the outputs, likewise for the speakers, plugging in the USB cable for the DVD drive and away to go.

In terms of software, it's a little more complicated. The S3 control panel is not what we'd call intuitive: it certainly lacks compared to NVIDIA's offering. As such, it took us a lot of searching (and a wasted hour) to work out how on earth to get the resolution to go beyond the 1024x768 that it ships at with default - a resolution which is clearly no good for the majority of widescreen LCD owners out there. It turned out that you have to manually go in and change the display type from TV to standard monitor, then Apply Changes, and only then can you go and play with the resolution. S3 offer 1366x768 as a widescreen resolution, unfortunately leaving users with no 1280x768 or 1280x720 resolution (common sizes for flat panels less than 30", and the latter the standard for 720p video). However, these can at least be added with a custom third party application like PowerStrip.

Performance: The actual performance of the system is a little disappointing. We've mentioned before that Media Center requires a fairly hefty system, and the VIA solution simply doesn't quite cut it in terms of raw CPU and I/O performance. The MCE GUI feels sluggish, and the system struggles to do more than one thing at once (like recording TV and playing back music). Boot up is often accompanied by heavy disk access, which can make the system unresponsive for a good couple of minutes. The onboard S3 graphics has a hardware MPEG decode accelerator; however, we found this to provide limited compensation. Unfortunately, this is not really the optimal way to use Media Center.

Featureset and Noise

Featureset: There are a couple of obvious things lacking from the beblu system. The first is (or are) dual tuners for TV viewing. The WinTV card included has a single digital tuner - this precludes watching one channel and recording another. There is scant availability of dual digital tuner cards, and so the alternative is a dual analogue card. We're honestly not sure which we prefer. However, the form factor precludes dual discrete tuner cards, which is obviously the ideal solution. If you want the beblu, you're going to have to compromise over a larger system.

The second thing is wireless. MCE requires internet access to get its TV listings, and most people buying this system would not want to trail a CAT5 cable to a router. You could get a USB dongle for the system, but there's no reason why a mini adaptor of some sort couldn't be integrated into the system.

The audio sounds perfectly reasonable, with 5.1 output from the digital port sounding as you'd expect. It's not Azalia High Definition, but it will be adequate for the majority of buyers.

Noise: The beblu is quiet, without being silent. The two 40mm fans in the chassis do make a bit of a whir, and there is also a small fan in the separate power supply. beblu offer an option to make the system completely silent, although this will cost you extra. The noise is perfectly fine for a Media Center system, but we would never object to having it a little quieter.

Conclusions

All in all, the beblu is a great little system, with a lot of promise, that falls over slightly when it comes to execution. The easiest way to conclude is with a list of pros and cons.

Pros: There are plenty of these. The small form factor is one big plus, and this goes hand in hand with the fantastic industrial design and the overall concept of the component-based system. The touch switch is a brilliant little feature, as is the 'halo' of LED indicators and the LCD display on the front. We also love the in-built IR receiver, which cuts down on USB clutter.

Cons: The beblu simply isn't quite fast enough. The Via chip can't really cope, and the EPIA mainboard lacks features like HD audio and wireless. The tuner problem will be cut out once dual digital tuners are available en masse, but that will be a while yet.

Overall: All in all, beblu are really pushing what can be done with Mini-ITX both in terms of form factor and performance. With the form factor, they've got it almost spot on. With performance, unfortunately, they don't quite have it. When Beblu release an updated system based on Pentium M and the 915 chipset, we're going to be awfully excited.