Watford Aries Media Experience 2006+ review

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Verdict:

Watford's Aries Media Experience 2006+ is very powerful, but the lack of a high-specification audio chipset means it can't match the Evesham Ebox 2 for value.

Review Date: 17 Mar 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Chris Finnamore

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Watford's Aries Media Experience 2006+ is a great-value media PC. It lacks a high-spec sound card, but its performance is excellent and it's cheaper than most other systems here.

FEATURES

This system is by far the biggest PC here. This doesn't mean extra room for expansion, however. Although there's room for a full-size motherboard, Watford has fitted a microATX one instead. There are three free PCI slots, but one is partially obscured by the graphics card.

It has DVI, S-video and composite outputs as standard. There are further D-sub and SCART outputs on a breakout cable, which plugs into a connector on the ATI All-in-Wonder 2006 graphics card. This is a hybrid analogue and digital card, so you can record one analogue or one digital channel at a time.

There are no graphics inputs built into the chassis, but another cable has composite and S-video inputs as well as stereo phono audio. The audio hardware is disappointing, though, with just 5.1 audio line outputs.

The Aries is supplied with a Media Center keyboard and its keys have better travel and feedback than other keyboards in the group.

The front of the chassis is fitted with an iMon VFD display. This displays the name of the media file, as well as DVD track and chapter information, but you may have to download the free FrontView utility to make it work correctly.

PERFORMANCE

The Aries performed superbly in our tests. The dual-core Athlon X2 3800+ processor and 1GB of RAM gave it the top score in the Shopper benchmarks and PCMark04. It can also play high-definition video without a hitch. 3D performance is above average and Doom 3 runs smoothly at 1,024x768 resolution.

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