Product Reviews

Media centre PCs equipped with a Blu-ray or HD DVD drive tend to be very expensive, so we were surprised that CyberPower's Media Centre 900 PC costs less than £850. Unfortunately, however, too many compromises have been made to accommodate the Blu-ray drive and keep the purchase price low.

The built-in Blu-ray drive can read and write Blu-ray discs. However, the 900 struggled to play our Blu-ray movies without dropping frames due to the lack of a dedicated graphics card. This is disappointing, since smooth Blu-ray playback could be achieved simply by adding an HDMI-equipped graphics card for as little as £70.

You should have no trouble recording hours of TV programmes for later viewing thanks to the built-in hybrid TV tuner and the two spacious 500GB hard disks. By default, one is set up to store your media files and the other for storing your programs and Windows installation, but you can configure them as a RAID 0 or 1 array if you wish. Oddly, no keyboard

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or mouse is included.

Disappointingly, the 900 has only a meagre of selection of ports despite its large and imposing midi-tower sized case. An HDMI port for connecting a high-definition TV is present, but while there's a standard TV-out port, no S-video or component adaptors are included in the box. There's no SCART video out or S/PDIF ports for connecting a surround-sound amplifier, either. You can connect a set of 7.1 surround-sound speakers and the front-mounted display shows useful information such as the music track currently playing.

As our benchmark results show, the 900 is more than powerful enough for use as your main PC. As expected, the integrated Radeon X1200 graphics chip isn't powerful enough to play the latest 3D games, although less-demanding titles should be playable. You can easily add a long PCI Express graphics card, but there's not enough room for a double-width card or one with a particularly large fan.

If you need even more hard disk space to store your media files, there are four empty drive bays but only one free SATA and one free PATA port. You could add a SATA controller to the single spare PCI slot, but if you then want to add another TV tuner, you'll have to opt for a PCI-E x1 or USB model.

CyberPower's Media Centre 900 is an unevenly specified PC. Its Blu-ray playback is hobbled by the lack of a dedicated graphics card, it has a meagre selection of ports despite its huge case and it doesn't have enough SATA ports for all its drive bays. These problems mean that the Media Centre 900 isn't very good value.