Polywell MiniBox 939AX review

The MCE 2005 operating system also gives you remote-control access for your PC's music, photo, and video files. We appreciate having all our media files organized under a single interface, and the Media Center remote is also easy to work with. But you pay a bit extra for the OS; it costs $23 more than XP Pro and $86 more than XP Home. You can also upgrade a single-tuner Nvidia NVTV Tuner card to a dual-tuner model for about $80. (Keep in mind that if you have a scrambled cable signal, you'll need two descramblers--cable boxes--to take advantage of dual tuners for recording two channels simultaneously or watching one channel while recording another.)

Support is where Polywell's utilitarian approach causes trouble. Don't expect to receive any useful documentation or preloaded software utilities with your 939AX. And even the hardware itself looked a little slapdash to us, with rear jacks not lining up perfectly with their housing and the faux-metallic Polywell sticker on the front panel beginning to peel off.

The same goes for service and support. The standard warranty covers parts for three years and includes depot labor for five years. During the first year, you receive 24/7, toll-free phone support. After the first year, phone support is still toll-free but available weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. PT. For $75 per year, you can swap out depot service for onsite service. But you'll find Polywell's Web site a huge mess; it's difficult to find what you want or get any substantial support. And any extra support services you choose are administered by a third party.

To measure application performance, CNET Labs uses BAPCo's SysMark 2004, an industry-standard benchmark. Using off-the-shelf applications, SysMark measures a desktop's performance using office-productivity applications (such as Microsoft Office and McAfee VirusScan) and Internet-content-creation applications (such as Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver). Depending on the class of the system, we may report only the office-productivity or Internet-content-creation portions of SysMark.

To measure 3D gaming performance, CNET Labs uses Epic Games' Unreal Tournament 2003, widely used as an industry-standard benchmark. We use Unreal to measure a desktop's performance with the DirectX 8.0 (DX8) interface at a 32-bit color depth and at a resolution of 1,024x768 and 1,600x1,200. Antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are disabled during our 1,024x768 tests and are set to 4X and 8X, respectively, during our 1,600x1,200 tests. At this color depth and these resolutions, Unreal provides an excellent means of comparing the performance of low-end to high-end graphics subsystems. We report the results of Unreal's Flyby-Antalus test in frames per second (fps).

Find out more about how we test desktop systems.

System configurations:

Alienware DHS-2 Media Center
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005; 3.0GHz Intel P4 530; Intel 915P chipset; 512MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 128MB ATI Radeon X300 (PCIe); Seagate ST3160023AS 160GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA

Cyberpower Media Center Ultra Edition
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005; 2.6GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-55; Via K8T800 Pro chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra (AGP); Maxtor 7Y250M0 250GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA

Polywell MiniBox 939AX
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005; 2.0GHz AMD Athlon 64 3200+; ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset; 512MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 64MB (shared) integrated ATI Radeon X200; Seagate ST3200822AS 200GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA

Sony VAIO VGC-RB38G
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005; 3.4GHz Intel P4 550; Intel 915G chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 128MB ATI Radeon X300 (PCIe); Maxtor 7Y250M0 250GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA

WinBook PowerSpec 410 MCE
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005; 3.0GHz Intel P4 530; Intel 915G chipset; 512MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz; 64MB ATI Radeon X300 (PCIe); Samsung SP1614C 160GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA