Labs

Like Shuttle's SN68PTG6, the Media Live is designed for use with Windows Media Center. It's designed to look like a set-top box, so it should fit neatly into a living room. The top of the case comes off easily and almost all the headers, slots and bays are easily accessible. The manual has some badly written sentences but is still easy to follow and comprehensive, even covering BIOS options and using Windows XP Media Center.

Annoyingly, the RAM slots are incorrectly colour coded for adding memory in dual-channel mode. A memory card reader is built in and there's room for two hard disks inside an easily removable cage.

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Shuttle's SN68PTG6, the Media Live has a front-mounted display for showing information such as the currently playing music track. The receiver for the included Windows Media Center remote is built in so it doesn't occupy a USB port.

You should have no trouble connecting the Media Live to your TV, as it has HDMI, SCART, S-video, component and composite outputs. There are also optical and coaxial S/PDIF ports for hooking up a surround-sound amplifier.

The included slot-loading DVD writer is useful and looks smart, but the burner is a laptop component instead of a standard ¼in desktop drive. Replacing it in the future with a Blu-ray optical drive could be costly as laptop drives are expensive, but we wouldn't recommend it in any case. The integrated graphics chip isn't powerful enough to play HD movies smoothly.

Upgrading the graphics card is impossible. A riser card is required, so that expansion cards can be fitted horizontally, but the riser has only a PCI slot on it, even though the motherboard has a PCI-E x16 slot.

MSI's Media Live is a good choice for a Media Center PC, but Shuttle's SN68PTG6 is cheaper, has an accessible PCI-E x16 slot and an easier optical drive to upgrade.