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With so much confusion surrounding home entertainment technologies right now, transforming your lounge room into a digital entertainment centre is a daunting task.

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Alloy's MediaHub media centre and LCD TV combo

With so much confusion surrounding home entertainment technologies right now, transforming your lounge room into a digital entertainment centre is a daunting task.

Alloy's MediaHub media centre

Alloys International is an Australian distributor of IT products but it also does high-end digital home fitouts, providing integrated high-definition entertainment, home automation and security packages. Alloys builds its own Windows XP Media Centre Edition home entertainment computers - branded MediaHub - to sit at the heart of these digital homes, but also sells stand-alone MediaHubs together with a high definition 37 inch LCD TV.

As it runs XP Media Center Edition, the MediaHub is a one-stop home entertainment system. You can watch standard and high definition free-to-air digital television as well as record it to the hard drive or DVD. You can also do cool things like record two programs at once, watch the start of a program while still recording the end, pause live TV and even rewind live TV. It's also compatible IceTV's seven-day Electronic Program Guide.

Currently MCE is about the only system, either PC-based or standalone device, that will let you do all of the above. Naturally it can also play DVDs, CDs and digital file formats such as MP3 and DivX. Of course it's also a PC, so you can kill the MCE interface and surf the net, check your email or play games. The MediaHub also comes with a remote control and infrared receiver, plus Alloys throw in the sexy Logitech diNovo Media Desktop Laser Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

The MediaHub sports a meaty Pentium D 930 dual 3GHz processor and 1GB of RAM under the bonnet, along with a 200GB, 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda hard drive. It's built on Intel's new VIIV platform, using the Intel 945GBO Multimedia series chipset which includes onboard high definition 5.1 and stereo audio. It also features a Hauppauge Nova-DT Dual DVB-T tuner card and an NVIDIA 128MB GeForce 6600 graphics card, the latter a tad under-speced compared to the competition.

MediaHub's uses Intel's BTX form-factor motherboard to offer better cooling. It's also supposed to support low-profile systems, but the MediaHub is built around a monster custom home theatre case about the size of your average home theatre amplifier. The polished silver should help it blend into your lounge room, but it's certainly not the most attractive home theatre case on the market. While the internal fans are quiet enough for a lounge room environment, the hard drive is surprisingly noisy and often seems to be working quite hard even when the system is idle. Those annoyed by such things will want to consider hiding the MediaHub in a reasonably sound-proof cabinet.

Within this beast lies a DVD burner, Firewire, USB2.0, gigabit Ethernet and memory card reader. It also has a front display which scrolls details of what you're watching along with general information such as the status of the PC and even weather reports. The graphics card offers one VGA and one DVI output, the latter of which connects to the HDMI input on the television. There's no Blu-ray or HD-DVD drive, but the beauty of a PC-based system is you can easily upgrade to such things when they become available (or affordable).

The MediaHub comes with a 37 inch, 1080p LCD television - meaning it can handle the highest video resolutions such as HDTV and Blu-ray or HD-DVD. It has HDMI, VGA and component inputs for high definition signals, along with composite, SCART and s-video plus 2-channel audio. High definition content looks razor sharp and, while the 4ms response time keeps blur to a minimum, we'd be reluctant to buy it only because we've got our eye on a few of the high-end brand name 1080p panels.

Apart from size, the MediaHub's main drawback in the price tag. For the same money you could pick up any of the media centre boxes reviewed in September's Labs Challenge and still have more than $AU5000 for a brand-name 1080p LCD panel. Still, if you want to give your lounge room a high-def make over with the latest technologies, all in one easy package, then Alloy's MediaHub bundle should hit the spot.

Adam Turner

CONTACT Alloys International

PHONE (03) 9415 8888

ONLINE www.alloysonline.com.au

PRICE $AU8725

PRICE SOURCE Alloys

PROS powerful, Bluetooth keyboard, 1080p LCD TV

CONS large, noisy, expensive

VERDICT 3.5 / 5

INTENDED MARKET Everyone

First published in APC Magazine (November 2006). This is the unedited copy, so it might vary slightly from what's in the magazine.