Polywell MiniBox 939AX review: Polywell MiniBox 939AX

Polywell MiniBox 939AX
Polywell won't win any industrial-design awards for its strictly utilitarian MiniBox 939AX Media Center PC. Then again, this is a system--dare we say, company--for knowledgeable buyers who are willing to put up with a few rough edges to save some green. Do-it-yourselfers may be able to overlook the system's lack of detailing and dearth of support documents (and Polywell's unattractive and unintuitive online configuration tool), but if you're new to Microsoft's Media Center OS, you may require more of a guiding hand to get the most out of it. If you'd rather purchase a more polished media PC, we recommend the WinBook PowerSpec MCE 410.

If you aren't ready to put a Windows OS at the center of your home theater, you don't need a glitzy, rack-mounted model such as the Alienware DHS-2. (The PowerSpec MCE 410 fits this description as well, but for the price, we'd happily place it on our desk.) While it may not fit in a designer living room, the MiniBox 939AX provides live-TV and video-recording capabilities on your desktop. Keep your TiVo attached to your TV and home theater and think of the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE 2005) as a bonus on the PC.

The MiniBox 939AX is a small-form-factor PC, though a rather boxy one at 8.0 by 10.5 by 12.6 inches (HWD). It serves up some geek chic with its glossy black front, matte-silver cladding, and blue neon lights. Below the lone optical drive sits a handy media-card reader along with a couple of USB 2.0 ports, a six-pin (powered) FireWire port, and headphone and microphone jacks. Integrated 5.1 audio ports can be found around back, with four additional USB 2.0 ports and another six-pin FireWire connector.

Removing a single thumbscrew in the rear allows you to take off the top panel, providing access to the optical drive stationed on top. This drive sits in a flip-up cage that pops out to allow you into the system's interior below. Although it's tight in there, you'll still find acceptable access to the x16 PCI Express graphics slot, three PCI slots, and four DIMM slots.

Polywell's bare-bones approach does shave some money off the price. Configured as it was for our testing, the unit came in at $1,327 (as of April 2005), including a 17-inch LCD. Our system also featured a 2.0GHz Athlon 64 3200+ processor, 512MB of RAM, a 200GB hard drive, and a double-layer DVD burner. You could complain about our test system's onboard Radeon Xpress X200 graphics and sound, but Polywell gives you plenty of upgrade options, if you're willing to spend more for them. For example, you can choose from a whole host of PCI Express graphics cards.

The MiniBox 939AX is in the same price range as the Sony VAIO RB38G and the WinBook PowerSpec MCE 410, but it trailed both systems on our application and 3D gaming benchmarks. The MiniBox 939AX was 8 percent slower than the PowerSpec 410 on the SysMark 2004 Internet-content-creation test, which we attribute to the MiniBox's AMD Athlon 64 3200+ not keeping pace with its Intel counterpart, plus the fact that the Polywell's integrated graphics borrow resources from the system memory. On our Unreal Tournament 2003 test, the MiniBox 939AX's frame rates were predictably lower than those of systems with discrete graphics cards. Today's games will bring the MiniBox 939AX to its knees, but you'll still be able to run 2D graphics--TV, DVDs, videos, photos--associated with Media Center PCs.

The 17-inch Hyundai LCD that Polywell bundled with our test system is too small for watching TV or movies from your couch. But it does give you the opportunity, for instance, to watch TV in a window on your screen while you work or surf the Web. Likewise, the bundled Creative SBS560 5.1 speakers provide enough audio for a bedroom or a dorm room, but they won't fill a larger room. The two peripherals that will allow you to unchain yourself from your desk are the excellent Logitech Cordless Desktop Optical keyboard and mouse.

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