Hi-Grade MicroDMS P60 review

We've seen plenty of Windows Media Center PCs over the years.

Almost all of them suffered from a single, tragic flaw - you just wouldn't want to put them in your living room. Yes, they had TV tuners installed, they allowed you to watch and record TV, listen to music, view photos and so on, but all too often they were either boxy and dull or over-designed and ugly.

Enter Hi-Grade's MicroDMS - it's small, well-designed and comes with lots of goodies. Its first big selling point is the Intel Core Duo processor. With its two processor cores, each running at 1.83GHz, this chip can run lots of demanding programs at once without grinding to a halt. This extra performance is vital in a Media Center PC, which can be called on to record a TV show, serve up web pages and do a virus scan all at the same time. Helped by the system's 1GB of RAM, the Core Duo storms through our 2D benchmarks to a score of 119%. That's more than fast enough to slice through any software you'd care to run, although the Intel graphics chip in the MicroDMS wasn't powerful enough to run our 3D games test.

Multitasking

The MicroDMS P60 comes with a single digital TV tuner installed, which means you can watch, record and pause all the Freeview channels. However, you can't watch a show on one channel and record a show from another - you need at least two tuners for that. The hard drive is a 2.5in model, of the kind normally found in laptops. Its 100GB capacity is currently the most available in a 2.5in drive, but it will quickly fill up if you record lots of video. Thankfully, the DVD drive can be used to archive data to all current DVD disc formats. Hi-Grade has also installed Wi-Fi, which will be useful for those with home networks - and network storage. The back of the wireless PC is relatively spartan, with a pair of USB ports, outputs for the monitor and a TV (S-Video), modem and network ports, plus speaker and mic sockets. If you have a decent home speaker setup, the speaker port doubles as an optical S/PDIF port, and you can attach up to a 5.1 setup. At the front, you'll find a few more ports - a third USB port, mini-FireWire and a memory card reader.

Stunning screen

If you fancy saving £330, you can order the MicroDMS without the Sony SMD-HS95PR 19in TFT. You'll be missing out though, as this is a very nice screen. With its 19in viewable area, it can be watched comfortably from across the room. The screen's X-black glossy finish makes colours appear vivid and rich, although it's slightly reflective. Our only complaint is that it isn't widescreen.

The system itself isn't hugely sexy - it isn't shiny and there's no brushed aluminium finish. On the other hand, it's incredibly compact for a desktop PC and, since it stands upright, it takes up little space. The MicroDMS is a fantastically well-designed and built PC. It can do everything a normal computer can, and can entertain you as well. But it isn't cheap and crucially, it has only a single digital TV tuner. For £260 less than the price of the MicroDMS you can buy the Elonex Artisan, which comes with two TV tuners and twice the hard disk space.