At 177mm high, Claritas’ TeraServer rivals the Labs-winning Altech in the bulk stakes. However, instead of a minimalist front panel there’s a great deal more crammed in.

Most obvious is the seven inch LCD touch screen. With this you can navigate through Media Center without turning your TV on. Below this are various control buttons for the mini screen and the power button. To the right is the camouflaged DVD slot and below this, a panel flaps down to reveal a media card reader, two USB 2, a FireWire and three audio jacks.

The case is that bit thicker than Altech’s and this noticeably masks much of the hard disk clicking – which is a good thing as there are three of them. It’s one of the only cases to support over two hard disks and Claritas makes full use by including two 400GB SATA discs running in RAID 0 for TV and a 200GB Ultra-ATA disk for the OS.

Claritas hasn’t stopped there with the luxuries. Four of the five PCI slots are used. There are two digital tuners, an 802.11g Wi-Fi card and a HAD Digital X-Mystique 7.1 Gold sound card. The fifth slot is partially obscured by the large passive cooler on the 6600 graphics card.

The lack of graphics card fan helps keep the noise to a minimum as does the ultra-quiet Zalman CPU HSF which covers an Athlon 64 3500+. Beyond this an exhaust fan and hard disk-cooling fan join the PSU fan and this can be adjusted by a dial at the back. It all amounts to a very quiet system indeed.

However, at five-and-a-half grand it comes at a whopping price. While it is clear that there are many people willing to shell out such money for Home Theatre luxuries we’re not convinced we’d buy the TeraServer. We just can’t find the front display practical. The stylus it comes with will be lost within a week and while using your finger nails is an option, we’d rather just turn on the TV. Most people will have the case close to the ground meaning you’ll be almost lying on your face.

A better warranty may have helped, at one year RTB (on-site support who live close to the central-Sydney office) you’d feel fed up if something went wrong after 14 months having paid so much. However, there is no doubting that it is exceptionally well built by people who know what they’re doing and you won’t fit a Terabyte of storage into many others. There’s also free delivery and a 12-month subscription to IceTV’s EPG and the MCE keyboard is a reasonable choice. It’s certainly tempting and a great talking point, but it just misses out on an award this month.