Product Reviews

While some companies gleefully jumped on to the PC-as-media-centre bandwagon at the very beginning, others have been more circumspect. The Asteio is the first we've seen from ASUS.

It features just about everything that we'd look for in a PC designed for the living room. For a start, it runs Windows Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE), which is head and shoulders the best interface we've seen - it only rarely reminds you that you're using a PC. It also has dual digital TV tuners, which means that you can watch one live channel while recording another, or record two and watch an earlier recording. This really unleashes MCE to do far more than you can with a traditional Freeview box, but it's often overlooked in competing products, which is a shame.

Glittering cast

As a PC, the Asteio also has a respectable supporting cast of components, including an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor. The two separate processing cores are ideal for coping with the heady demands placed upon a media centre PC, and while each only runs at 1.86GHz, it's more than a match for even the fastest Pentium 4s. It's much more power efficient too, making it both cheaper to run and easier to cool.

There are two fans inside, running as slowly as they can. You'll hear a very low whoosh in a silent room, but as soon as you put on even background music, any noise effectively disappears. The only side effect is that the case gets rather warm, so it does needs good airflow around

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Modest graphics

The nVidia GeForce 7600GS graphics card is reasonably modest by the latest desktop PC standards, but still capable of handling modern 3D games, particularly at TV-like resolutions. If you're not a gamer, it's also worth noting that this card is HD-compatible up to the full 1080p standard and also supports HDCP (High Definition Content Protection). This means you'll be able to play protected HD content if you install Windows Vista and if content ever makes it onto DVD or Freeview services. There's a next generation HDMI-port if your TV supports it, although there's also digital DVI, composite and S-Video, but no SCART.

Another highlight is the combined wireless keyboard and trackpad, with individual switches for each to save power, plus a multitude of shortcut buttons. It operates to a range of around 30ft and doesn't need line-of-sight to work. There's a standard infrared remote for controlling Media Center's functions too, which is satisfyingly chocolate bar-like in the hand.

Ugly duckling

There are some slightly bigger disappointments though. Firstly, the Asteio doesn't have the drop-dead gorgeous appeal that we'd hope for in a living room PC - it's inconspicuous enough to look at, but is disappointingly plastic once you look closely. Second, the 250GB hard disk may sound a lot (and would be if you were just creating Word documents), but it's not all that much a family's music, photos and recorded TV.

But these aren't terminal shortcomings and ASUS has otherwise got the fundamentals spot on - even the £899 price tag is more than reasonable. Ironically, the killer blow for buying a media centre PC right now is the forthcoming Windows Vista operating system. It may be a few months away yet, but its version of Media Center is such a vast improvement on the already pretty slick MCE 2005 that it's impossible not to recommend waiting for it. If you really can't bear to wait a moment longer, the Asus Asteio should certainly be on your shortlist, but a little patience will pay dividends.