The HP Media Center PC 873n

Although this review focused mainly on MCE, we would like to provide a quick look at the HP Media Center PC that we used for our tests.

The HP Media Center PC 873n comes with a 2.53GHz Pentium 4 on an 845G motherboard made by FIC with 512MB of DDR266 SDRAM. You'll also find a SB Audigy and 56K modem on the inside of the PC, along with onboard Ethernet. This particular configuration came with a DVD writer and a regular CD drive as well. The power button has a blue LED behind it that glows quite brightly, which can be a problem in a very dark room if you don't want to attract a ton of attention to the PC.

HP also bundles the system with a universal memory reader accessible from the front of the PC; the reader will accept SmartMedia, MMC/SD, Memory Stick and CompactFlash cards. It's too bad that MCE won't recognize a memory card with pictures on it and let you browse it in the Media Center interface. HP completes the package by bundling a set of Klipsch Promedia 2.1s with the machine.

There's nothing too special about the design or assembly of the PC, other than the fact that it is very quiet thanks to a large heatsink on the CPU and a large, slow spinning fan.

The system comes with a GeForce4 MX by default, which unfortunately means that the best video output you can get is via a S-Video cable; no component out here, not without upgrading the system yourself to an All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500/9700.

In order to prevent users from connecting anything to the onboard VGA connector (powered by the 845G graphics), HP covered up the port as you can see above.

Interestingly enough, HP doesn't ship the 873n with any sort of wireless keyboard or mouse. They are fully expecting you to work with the remote for anything media related and deal with a wired PS/2 keyboard and mouse for everything else.

The keyboard does have some useful controls on it, too bad it has a very short cable.

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