Beautifully designed with a clear interface, but format support is limited

Even though the Voodoo3 3500 TV is an older card than most on test in this Labs, we have included it since it, along with the ATI All-In-Wonder 128 Pro,fills a niche in the graphics card market that caters to people looking for a low-cost TV and video capture card alongside reasonable 3D gaming performance.

A promising start for Apple’s living-room takeover, but we’re still waiting for the best bits.

It's a close race between this draft-n Vista Media Extender and the Xbox 360 for getting HD video to your TV. If you watch video from your Vista PC, read on.

Similar in nature to the Zinwell ProV (June 2002, page 46) but with better execution, the X-Media DreamBox is a small set-top box for your desktop that lets you watch TV, video, console games and DVDs on your monitor without the need to power on your PC.

A very tidy solution for streaming your downloaded video to the TV, without the need for a full Media Center PC.

The ProV is a product similar in nature to the Canopus ADVC-100 (page 44), but where the ADVC-100 is used for transcoding video streams with an eye on digital video work, the ProV is used to bring versatility to your computer monitor, or breathe life into any spare monitors youve got laying around.

The DAV310 from A-MAX Technology circumvents this limitation by being able to play MP3 tracks straight off a CD - just like your PC can.

A beautifully tiny computer-on-a-board that you should only consider if you have a specific use in mind

A Media Center Extender, upscaling DVD player and great games console

The TViX is a fairly small box, roughly about the same size as a good DVD box-set, but inside it's got some amazing smarts. This also technically isn't a media streamer as such - it's more a media cacher thanks to the 80GB hard drive inside.

The idea of using your PC as the central control point for your home theatre has been bandied about for some time.

Impressive features for a reasonable price, but image quality leaves us cold

The solution for anyone who is starting to run out of HDMI inputs.

Triplex Xabre Ultra 600

The 'Ti4800SE' tag of Albatron's graphics card doesn't signify that it's a superior extension of the GeForce4 Ti4600 – in fact, it's really just an NV28 (the AGP 8x of the GeForce4 Ti) version of NVIDIA's Ti4400, coupled with a slightly increased core clock speed.

Stunning living-room style, great image quality and a price thatwon’t break the bank

A competent card with older games, but it can’t handle the new generation of games.

An affordable way to get excellent frame rates.

The 7800 GT is hard to find and is being usurped by the 7900 GT.