Product Reviews

There was a time when all PCs came in beige boxes and no-one thought anything of it. Now there's an abundance of stylish designs to be had. Into this frenzy of styling comes the Hush E2-MCE.

Hush systems make everything else look a bit naff. The stylish aluminium case is perfectly understated; pop it under your TV and visitors won't even notice you have a PC in the room at all as it looks just like a fancy hi-fi component.

Its near-silent running completes this illusion. The case contains no fans whatsoever. Instead all the heat from the internal components is directed by heat pipes to the arrays of large fins down either side of the case. These fins act as heat sinks, letting the heat dissipate quickly. Only the hard disk makes any noise and this is barely noticeable.

Once the E2-MCE is nestling among your home entertainment components, it can

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do a lot for you. Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is installed and can deal with music, movies and web browsing. It is a fully featured Personal Video Recorder (PVR), allowing you to pause or record live TV to the 200GB hard disk. All this is well organised through Media Center's streamlined interface and controlled using the supplied remote control.

The E2-MCE scored fairly well in our application benchmarks, indicating that it's capable of doing everything expected of a Media Center PC. Its 3D performance was not as impressive, with recent releases such as Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 having to be played at reduced resolutions to run smoothly. A wide range of graphics card upgrades is available for those who require more 3D power.

Our one niggle is the optical drive. It is perfectly set into the front of the system but pressing the eject button doesn't elicit the smooth purr of an extending disc tray. Instead it pops out, revealing itself to be a laptop-style drive, which feels flimsy compared to the rest of the system. A slot-loading device would be an improvement.

There is no doubt that the E2-MCE is a special computer. In our opinion there is nothing else on the market that competes with it in terms of overall build quality, quiet operation and style. It looks amazing, but the price will bring you down to earth with a bump. Unless you have to have a completely silent Media Center PC, much better deals can be found elsewhere.