high on solder

I have used my Shuttle home theater PC for almost 2 years now and while it was a solid box, it was getting a little long in the tooth. With a single core AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor it could chug at times even with the decent nVidia 7600GS video card I had installed in the system. Earlier this year Dell announced their Studio Hybrid, a mini PC similar to the Mac Mini, which looked like a fantastic HTPC. This combined with the Ubuntu 8.10 release and its much improved device compatibility led me to take the Studio Hybrid plunge. As you can see from the picture it is a very compact machine, about half the size of a PS3.

I got mine with the standard specs, except I upgraded the processor one step to the Core 2 Duo which is definitely worth the extra $50.

• 2GHz Core 2 Duo
• 2GB RAM
• 160GB Hard Drive
• Intel X3100 integrated graphics
• DVD Burner
• 10/100/1000 NIC
• 7-in-1 Card Reader
• Firewire
• 5x USB
• HDMI & DVI video out

I installed Ubuntu 8.10 and have been running it now for a few days on my new Samsung 37" 1080p TV without issue. I have read several times that Intel's integrated graphics aren't adequate for HTPCs, however, with a sufficiently powerful processor they are more than capable. 1080p content plays very smoothly on this machine, something that wasn't possible on my old Shuttle box. It is also a lot quieter than my Shuttle, though not completely silent. It does have some fan noise from the CPU cooler, but it is more of a low woosh sound as opposed to the higher pitched fan whine the Shuttle put out. The slot-load DVD burner is significantly quieter than the one in my XPS 1330 laptop, both in loading and in operation. Overall I am very pleased with the build quality and finish of the Studio Hybrid.

The only problem I have encountered is that sometimes when the system has finished booting it just shows a black screen. But if I reboot the X-server by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace it brings the video back and works fine from then on out. I am unsure as to why this is other than native X3100 support is still relatively new to Ubuntu and a few kinks may still need to be worked out.

Update on Saturday, November 22, 2008 at 3:19PM by Joe

After running the Studio Hybrid for about a week while attached to my Kill-a-Watt power meter I am impressed with how efficient this unit really is. On average it used a mere 27W under typical usage over the week compared with the 67.5W that my old Shuttle HTPC used. Not a bad improvement for a machine that is significantly faster, smaller and quieter.

Update on Thursday, December 11, 2008 at 5:33PM by Joe

In response to a request from the comments I tested the HDMI and SPDIF optical outputs. The HDMI video worked perfectly in Ubuntu, however I was unable to get any audio out of the optical audio output. On other machines I was able to add a IEC958 volume slider to the Volume Control Panel and with this set to 0, I could get SPDIF audio output. I was unable to duplicate this on the Studio Hybrid, probably because the audio chipset is different enough that Ubuntu doesn't contain as complete a device driver. If anyone gets this working let me know since while I don't require this feature now, I may in the future.

Update on Friday, January 30, 2009 at 1:06PM by Joe

In the last few days a couple of Ubuntu kernel and X-server updates have been rolled out which appear to fix the black screen on boot issue that I was experiencing with my Studio Hybrid. The last couple of times I rebooted the OS came up on the first try without requiring me to reboot the X-server. This effectively eliminates the only major con I had with the system.