The System
On opening the box you can tell the Altron MM10 is a serious piece of equipment. It's a large, brushed-aluminium box with a distinctive neon-blue sound level meter on the front. The front drives, USB, and audio jacks are accessible by a stylish damped-aluminium door. Internally, the system is quite neatly laid out. Despite several cooling fans, and a ducted CPU vent, it is still rather silent. Interestingly, too, the hard drive is mounted on the side of the main chassis, but there is plenty of space for extra drives inside.

It already wins on appearance alone but how does it perform?

The MM10 is blessed with some fairly grunty hardware - an Athlon 64 3500+, 512MB RAM, 9600XT. It will easily handle any application you throw at it. The software bundle is also good with Nero, a software DVD player.

The Audio
For a system with so much beefy goodness, it is disappointing to note the MM10 only sports an onboard Realtek ALC850 sound source. In normal use the difference won't be noticeable, but serious audiophiles would probably want to add a decent sound card. But it is the front of the unit where the biggest audio-related problems lie with this unit.  The flashy decibel meter on the front doesn't seem to want to work - no amount of shouting at it or twiddling internal volume buttons would make it move. The unit also comes with an extraneous volume knob that also doesn't work, and the front headphone output suffers from audio interference; it hums and pops between audio tracks.

The Video
The included 9600XT will play most modern games without a hitch, and the VGA output is as good as expected, but the change to S-Video is quite noticeable. Text is still readable, but there is a slight blurriness to the picture. This is fairly typical of most S-Video capable cards. Switch to Composite output and the picture turns for the worst. Text is terrible. Unreadable. If you're thinking of getting into HTPC's then an S-Video input (and a High Definition-capable TV) is the minimum you'll need to get a sensible picture.

The Conclusion
Of all the units we've looked at this is the only one you wouldn't be embarrassed about putting under your TV. It doesn't come with a monitor as it's designed as a lounge PC, but you'd need a fairly good TV to run it optimally. The only real weakness in this system is the lack of a dedicated sound card.