Product Reviews

The Advent is a PC designed to entertain. The first clue to its raison d'etre is the conspicuous absence of any monitor. Instead, the MC3040 hooks straight up to your TV and, thanks to the copy of Windows Media Center that's installed, gives you all the benefits of Windows XP with the added bonus that you can watch and record TV, play DVDs, CDs and sift through your photos using a remote control, all from the comfort of your favourite armchair.

LOUNGE LIZARD

But if you're going to bring a PC into your lounge it's got to look good. A beige box with wires hanging out of it just won't cut the mustard. To this end Advent has equipped the MC3040 with a 802.11g wireless card so you can send data to another PC in your home without trailing cables throughout the house. Good thinking!

In an attempt to give its PC some fashion appeal, Advent has given the MC3040 a matt silver paint job, with the front DVD drive, card reader and miscellaneous ports covered by a natty reflective silver cover. And, as the Advent stands on its side, it won't take up too much room next to your TV either! But while it looks smart, the Advent is unlikely to wow the style-conscious among you. Ironically enough, given the Advent's desire to replace the VCR in your life, it looks strangely reminiscent of a hefty old VCR from the eighties.

POWER WHERE IT COUNTS

To keep everything thrumming away happily, Advent has chosen to use an Intel Pentium 4 chip running at 2.93GHz, allied to 512MB of memory. So far, so unremarkable. The 160GB hard disk is ample, but when you consider that just one minute of recorded TV takes up about 30 MB of hard disk space, it's not enormous. Sensibly, Advent has included

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a DVD writer capable of burning the new large capacity dual-layer DVD discs, so once you've recorded your favourite programs you can easily copy them onto DVD discs and free up space on the hard disk for new recordings.

We weren't expecting stratospheric performance from such a modestly specified machine, but the Advent surprised with an eminently decent 91.72 in our demanding 2D benchmarks. To gauge the Advent's 3D performance we used our demanding Doom 3 benchmark. To really give the machine a good workout, we used our standard settings of 1024x768 resolution, with the game's quality setting switched to high.

We also enabled 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering, which improve image quality by smoothing out rough edges and ensuring textures stay crisp even as they recede into the distance. At these demanding settings the Advent struggled to a low 2.5fps - but thanks to the fact that it supports Microsoft's latest gaming instructions, DirectX 9, it did at least render Doom 3's natty visual effects correctly. Turn off the performance-sapping options like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering and keep the resolution down to a reasonable 1024x768 or below, and the Advent will happily churn its way through most modern games.

COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE

Not everything is so positive, though. The wireless keyboard and mouse are pretty horrid, both in looks and feel. OK, so you'll probably spend more time watching TV than typing letters, but we'd still have liked something a bit more comfortable to use. Advent has made a much more serious oversight, though. It has fitted an analogue TV tuner, restricting you to the five standard terrestrial TV channels. A digital TV tuner would have been a much better choice, providing access to more like 30 Freeview channels, and a good selection of digital radio channels too. Shame.

BUYING DECISIONS

The Advent MC3040 isn't a bad attempt at a Media Center PC - far from it - but when you set it against the likes of PC Next Day's Zoostorm Iwill 2.6GHz (reviewed March 2005) it doesn't look like great value for money. Especially when you consider that for the same money PC Next Day's offering has a digital TV tuner, a 17in TFT and a set of reasonable 2.1 speakers to boot!

SASHA MULLER