Product Reviews

A media centre PC equipped with a TV tuner ensures you never miss your favourite TV shows, but leaving it on constantly is a burden on your electricity bill and the environment. VeryPC claims its Treeton Standard media centre computer uses only 26W when idle, and 30W on average.

However, in our tests we found that it used 40W when idle and around 65W when churning through our demanding benchmarks. These figures are still lower than a standard £600 PC, which consumed around 80W when idle and roughly 120W during our tests. However, they're nowhere near as low as Apple's Mac mini, which used only 20W when idle and around 50W during our tests. The Mac mini's Core 2 Duo processor is designed for laptops, so it's more power-efficient than the Treeton Standard's dual-core Athlon processor, which was designed for desktop PCs.

The Treeton Standard's Athlon 64 X2 BE-2300 processor and 2GB of RAM performed reasonably well in our benchmarks, although the Mac mini and its Core 2 Duo T7200 processor was faster, despite

We were also disappointed by the lack of an S/PDIF port for connecting a surround-sound receiver. The Treeton Standard comes with a PCI tuner, so you can record Freeview programmes. It's a single tuner so you can't, for example, record one programme while watching another. An inexpensive USB tuner can be added later, though. A more serious limitation is the 120GB hard disk, which is too small if you want to use the Treeton Standard as your main PC and store lots of TV recordings as well.

A larger hard disk can be added, although this PC only has room for a 2in laptop disk. These are considerably more expensive and less spacious than their desktop counterparts. The disk and the laptop-style DVD writer are mounted in a cage, which can be tricky to remove. The Treeton is compact, but there's little room for upgrades inside the cramped case other than replacing the PCI TV tuner.

Before you decide to buy a Mac mini, bear in mind that Apple's Front Row has no TV capabilities, while Vista's Media Center is better than any Freeview box we've seen. It also has a five-year, return-to-base warranty.

We can't recommend the Treeton, though. Its power usage isn't particularly low for a media centre PC, and it has only one TV tuner and a small hard disk. It doesn't even come with a remote control or keyboard as standard.