AMD Maui HTPC Review

Hello everybody, Marco Chiappetta for Hot Hardware here.

Over the past few months, we’ve shown you quite a few sneak peaks at AMD’s Maui Home Theatre PC Platform. If you’re unfamiliar with Maui, it’s basically a combination of AMD processor chipsets, graphics and peripherals in combination with AMD Live Software Components assembled in a compact Home Theatre PC Form Factor.

At the heart of the platform is an MSI motherboard that features D2Audio Technology that can be configured with either a 5.1 amplifier or up to a 7.1 channel pre-amp. You’ve got to see this thing, it’s pretty cool. Check it out.

Our AMD Maui Home Theatre PC can be assembled in this sleek and media PC enclosure. As you can see, the most dominant feature on the front of this case is this read out right here. This read out can display various information like PC health data for health data for example or information about media being accessed through Windows Media Center Edition. Just above the display is this drive bay, we’ve got a Blu-ray drive in this system here. And at the bottom is a full down panel and behind it you can see a USB port, built in flash card reader, Firewire port, a couple more USB ports and --port and headphone and microphone jacks. Just above them are the power and resets switches.

There is a lot of stuff to see in the back of the AMD Maui Home Theatre PC. Here’s a standard ATX power supply and a couple of cooling fans that came with the NVIDIA Media PC enclosure that was used. And the I/O backplane, you have HD component output, DV15 VGA output, SPDIF inputs and outputs and an HDMI output with audio. We you note that that HDMI output can also be adapted to DVI using an included dongle. Just next to that are a few USB ports, a LAN jack, Firewire port. And to the right of that are various analog audio inputs and outputs.

Next, you can see the cable and the antenna inputs on the AMD Theatre 650 card. And to the right of that is something new. What this is is a connector block that will allow you to wire up speakers directly to the amplifier that’s built in to he MSI motherboard using this system. More on that next.

There is a lot going on inside our AMD Maui Home Theatre PC. I thought we would point out a few with a more common components first. Once that you’re likely they have seen before. First, we have AMD Stereo 650 TV Tuner card here. We’ve covered that on Hot Hardware quite a few times in the past. Here, you have a standard SATA Seagate hard drive, a SATA Blu-ray player. And here, we have a high efficiency corsair 450 watt PSU.

We should point that this system consumes about 70 watts while idling and under load, it can consume about a 100 to 115 watts depending on what you’re doing with the system.

Here is the standard DDR2 RAM used in the AMD Maui Home Theatre PC. The next two is something you might not have seen before. Cooling the AMD Phenom X49350E CPU powering this system is a low profile silent flux CPU cooler.

This cooler is interesting and that it uses an evaporator chamber and tubes filled with liquid coolant to cool the CPU. As the liquid in the evaporator chamber is heated, it runs through the tubes then through this radiator where it’s cooled and the cycle completes again. It does a very good job cooling this low power CPU and works fine without a dedicated fan mounted to it. With the higher end CPU, that probably wouldn’t be the case but here it works quite well.

Our AMD Maui Home Theatre PC is built upon MSI’s Media Live DIVA 5.1 motherboard. This motherboard uses AMD’s 7 ATM chipset which features an Integrated DX10 Radeon graphics core. We should also note that the graphics core built in here can off-load much of the HD video processing duties from the whole CPU. Just move playback.

What makes the board more interesting though is the integrated Intersil D2Audio DA3 chip that’s onboard. That sound chip works in conjunction with this card here which is probably something you haven’t seen before. With that is, is basically a built in 100 watt per channel 5.1 amplifier. If you want to use standard speakers that are not amplified with this rig like you would use in many Home Theatre setups, there’s no need to have a separate amplifier.

If you prefer to use a higher-end amp however, a 7.1 Channel pre-amp card is also available as an option. One of the beauties of AMD’s Maui Home Theatre PC platform is the seamless integration of AMD hardware, an AMD Live Software Components with Windows Media Center. We’ve got a few of the amps running now and I’m going to show them to you here.

First up is AMD’s Live Explorer. These applications give users easy access to various on-demand media. That’s how they’re stored on the web or on the user’s PC. You can also access locally stored photos, music, videos and television right from one interface. Other live components show up on the right.

It’s within Windows Media Center that a lot the excitement happens though so we’re going to show you that now. If you’re unfamiliar with Media Center, it’s basically a 10 foot interface that runs on top of Windows that lets users control their PC using a remote control. Here, you see the menu running on the AMD Maui PC. And since our system is equipped with an AMD Theatre 650 TV Card, we’d thought to show you some live TV right in action; just give it a moment for the app to load.

As you can see, it works just like any other setup box. You pick your channel, you hit enter and it’s going to take you right there. In addition while you’re watching TV, you can even switch to other apps. So, you can see the TV continuous to play in the background there.

Next, we’re going to move on to some Blu-ray playback using RXsoft’s Total Media. We’ve got a Casino Royale Blu-ray disc in the drive right now. Just give it a moment, the apps going to load and you’ll see how the machine plays back full 10 ATP content. Now, Blu-ray discs do take a few seconds to load that’s why you saw that delay there. Let’s turn up the volume once again so you can hear the audio.

As you can see, perfectly smooth video play back. Let’s bring up task manager and see how the system is being test. So even with a full High Definition Blu-ray disc playing, if you’re looking at only 35% to 36% max CPU utilization with an AMD Phenom Quad Core in the rig, that’s obviously going to go a little higher if you’ve got a dual core in there.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this looking at AMD’s Maui Home Theatre PC platform. Once again, this is Marco Chiappetta for Hot Hardware. Thanks for stopping by.