3. Ready For Prime-Time: Media Center Edition 2005 PCs

PC vendors had some reservations about the first versions of MCE, and only a handful of offerings went to market. Today, the Media Center PC Showcase (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/evaluation/products.mspx) lists 17 vendors with MCE products, and over 50 individual Media Center PC models are available (19 vendors serve the European market). Companies involved run the gamut from giants like Dell, Gateway, and HP to boutique outfits like Hush Technologies and Niveus Media, among other smaller players, many of which offer outstandingly quiet and advanced systems.

Departing from the cube design: Hush Technologies offers sleek, compact fanless Media Center PCs to the cognoscenti.

German boutique PC vendor Hush Technologies offers a silent and fan less Media Center PC that offers a sleek design and is a triumph in small form-factor engineering. Motherboards for either Pentium P4 or Athlon 64 processors are available, and this PC includes a 200 GB 3.5" Seagate Barracuda drive as a base option (300 and 400 GB drives are also available). A single tuner/FM radio Hauppauge card is the base TV option, but a dual-tuner version is also available. The unit supports up to 4 GB of DDR400 RAM (512 MB supplies the base option), and also includes an ATI Radeon 9600 128 MB DVI/CRT/TV out graphics cards (bigger, faster ATI adapters are also available). A Microsoft MCE Remote Control is included, and the unit proffers 4 USB 2.0 ports, plus serial, parallel, mouse, keyboard and 3 audio jacks on its back, as well as 2 USB 2.0 and 2 Firewire ports, plus one headphone and one microphone jack on the front. Overall dimensions are 17.3" wide, 15" deep and 3.5" tall - perfectly compatible with most modern audio and multimedia components. Two external IR blasters (for cable or satellite receiver control) and an external IR receiver are also included when the system is purchased in North America.

Compact cube designs for Media Center PCs are available from Shuttle (Media Center XPC), which offer four different complete systems that incorporate MCE 2005 plus other necessary features. While Taiwanese vendor MSI doesn't offer a complete system version of its popular Mega 865, many do-it-yourselfers have built nice MCE 2005 systems on this platform, and third parties like X2 Corporation advertise compelling multimedia systems around the Mega 865 as well (the Pro model includes an integrated HDTV tuner, in fact). The same is true for other offerings, such as the Skyhawk ICM-6375 or Trigem's Kloss KL-I915A.

Other Media Center PC designs that aren't cubed-shaped are available. For example, various offerings from HP and ViewSonic - most notably, the HP z500 digital entertainment centers and the ViewSonic Media Center PC X-Press - offer more stylish alternatives compared to traditional tower-case designs. ABS, CyberPower, Ricavision and the ZT Group all employ horizontal cases, most of which have additional VFD or touch screen displays, which make these offerings look more like multimedia components.

In addition to the Hush Technologies high-end offering, another company that aims at the top end of the Media Center PC market is Niveus Media, which offers two different packages. Both are built around the same kind of silent, fan less heat pipe technologies that Hush also uses in its designs. The Niveus Ranier edition starts at about $3,000 and provides dual TV tuners, six channel Audio, and more; the Niveus Denali Edition starts at about $4,800 and adds an HDTV tuner to its two conventional TV tuners, as well as 24 bit high definition 8-channel audio and humongous disk storage capacity. Well known specialty PC houses including Voodoo (which builds a snazzy offering around the Ahanix Aria touch screen HTPC case) and Alienware now offer Media Center PC packages as well, which eschew conventional small tower cases typical of desktops in favor of horizontal cases designed to fit inside typical entertainment centers.

The Hush E3 Media Center Edition system uses no fans: heat pipes cool all internal components.

The Toshiba Qosmio delivers a genuine Media Center PC in notebook form, complete with TV Tuner, digital video recorder capability, built-in Harmon Kardon stereo speakers and various surround sound options. F-Series models offer a 15.5" display, and G-Series a 17" display. Models in both series feature Pentium M processors.