3. All In All, A Traditional PC

The PC aspect of the DEC is very traditional, albeit with the choice of high-end components. Instead of a long explanation, here's a table showing what's under the hood of the DEC z552.

Performance

The DEC is in many ways actually overpowered for a living room PC. A 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 is not really necessary for the tasks it'll be performing; the only operation for which a dual core might have been useful is encoding HD video.

Storage

The very large 200 GB hard disk should be sufficient at first. The performance isn't really important - it's more than ample for playing video. As for the HP 640 16x double-layer DVD Writer with LightScribe technology , we've already tested it for you.

Video Card

As usual, this is where the other shoe drops. Not only was the ATI X300SE clearly not the best choice, the DEC can only take a half-height card. This is obviously a poor choice for games - there's no need to go into detail about that. That's a shame, especially since with a wireless pad, any number of PC action and sports games are perfectly suited for playing from the couch. What's worse is that this is also not the optimum card in terms of interpolation and 2D video outputs.

The best choice clearly would have been an NVIDIA GeForce 6600 with the new Pure Video engine and a driver that lets you set the DVI output to HD 720p. This avoids painstaking resolution adjustments with LCD and plasma screens and HD projectors.