Intriguing styling makes this near-silent media-centre PC stand out, but it has its foibles

A stylish all-in-one media centre that effortlessly handles all tasks thrown at it. But it’s disgracefully priced.

A poor performer in the face of HP’s similarly-priced, touch screen-enabled rival.

Great design and comprehensive features make it a truly great Media Center PC. Only the price lets it down.

Flexible, beautifully designed and reasonably priced. An excellent attempt to attract the masses.

A flexible and powerful livingroom PC that ticks almost all the right boxes, as well as being great value.

An adequate Media Centre PC, but Asus’ competitor blows it out of the water.

Chunky, powerful and intimidating. Everything you want in a PC, but not what you'd want in a media centre.

A decent PC with media abilities bolted on, transforming this into a good lounge machine.

Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005 was launched with quite a bit of fanfare late last year, and not least of all because it was the first time in its 18 month life Australians could buy systems based on the OS.

When it comes to accessories, the Aspire has one of the best bundles supplied for this roundup: including an MCE remote and a radio/TV antenna! It also has a decent specification list: 3Ghz Pentium 4; 160GB HDD; and 512MB RAM. The only sticking point here, amongst all this multimedia goodness, is the inclusion of the Mobility X300 video card. It's like building a Ferrari and installing a two-stroke motor. It doesn't make much sense.

Nominating Sato as our winner for the desktop machines this month was fairly straightforward, especially when compared to deciding the outcome of the closely-fought notebook war. Because, even though the Sato was outdone by one or two systems in terms of performance, nothing beat it on pure value for money.

The Mega 2801 has one of the coolest features seen on a HTPC: it lets you play CDs (but not DVDs) without the computer turned on. It has two red buttons on the fascia that let you choose between CD or PC.

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.

In an unusual combination of styles, DigitalStar has used a silver Cooler Master Centurion full size ATX case, but coupled this with a black optical drive and floppy disk drive. If you're finicky about that sort of thing, there are additional face plates available that attach to the front to keep the colours consistent.

While the epithet 'multimedia PC' used to be bandied about to over-hype any PC in the mid-'90's that was capable of playing music, rudimentary video, and games, the descriptive was overused so much on sub-par PCs that the impact of any real multimedia capabilities was diminished in the wash of pretenders.

Every once in a while, we receive a PC for review thats an absolute pleasure to use, offering stunning quality and bucketloads of performance. XENONs Atomic 625 is all this and more.