Product Reviews

The sleek metal box that houses Evesham's ebox Dual Tuner could easily be mistaken for a hi-fi component.

Design-wise, Evesham has got it spot on, as this particular PC runs Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Sold without a monitor, it is designed to sit beneath a TV, recording shows and playing MP3s, videos and photo slideshows.

Evesham has certainly thought hard about the design. The front is very plain, with just a single power button, slot-loading DVD writer, infrared receiver and USB2, FireWire and audio ports. The rear hides additional USB2, FireWire, Modem, Network and audio ports.

One potential problem is that the fan directs hot air out through the top of the case. As this box would slide neatly under a television, you'll need to make sure the vent isn't blocked or risk overheating. Fortunately, it's a very quiet

Its beauty is more than skin deep, too. First, it's not a bad PC in its own right. A 3GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor and 512MB of RAM provide enough power for most applications. Scoring 105 in our Shopper application benchmarks, it's slightly faster than our reference computer.

Unfortunately, the ATI Radeon X300 graphics card isn't so good. A score of just 1,782 in 3DMark03 shows that it can only cope with older games. That said, this isn't really the kind of PC you'd use to play new 3D games. For other tasks, however, it's an accomplished system and Evesham has taken full advantage of Media Center 2005's ability to support dual tuners.

The 160GB hard disk is the minimum we'd expect to find in a PC. In this case, it may be a little small. Once you've loaded the ebox with MP3s and digital photos and recorded TV programmes, space will be eaten up very quickly. A 250GB hard disk would have been better. Fortunately, there's a DVD writer, so you can back up old shows to disc. Software to do this is bundled with Media Center, and you can operate it using the remote control.

Evesham includes a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse with the ebox Dual Tuner but using the desktop on a regular TV can be difficult.

For £999 the ebox is very good value, especially when you include the dual TV tuners. We'd be tempted to upgrade the hard disk, though.