Hands on: Blu-ray on a Media Center PC

A The combination of high bit rates and complex compression means playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD titles can cause issues for even fairly modern PC configurations. Indeed, even half-decent dual-core processors can be maxed out at 100 per cent attempting to do the job alone.

This is no different to normal DVDs when they first arrived, and coming to the rescue then, as now, are graphics chipsets with hardware acceleration to take the strain.

As you've already realised, your onboard Nvidia 6150 isn't really up to the job, so if you'd like to offload most of the strain from your CPU and guarantee smoother playback you'll need to fit a graphics card with hardware acceleration dedicated to the formats used by Blu-ray and HD DVD.

If you're going for an Nvidia solution, you're looking at a card with a Geforce 8 series or higher with support for Purevideo HD. If you're going for ATI, you'll need a Radeon HD 2000 or higher (HD 4800 series for Blu-ray picture-in-picture), with support for Avivo HD.

When choosing a card, be sure to check the small print, as some models may not fully support the respective acceleration technologies required. You'll also need to install the latest drivers to support the acceleration.

Gigabyte offers fanless models with HD acceleration, PCI Express interfaces and DVI outputs (which can be adapted to HDMI); its GV-NX86T256H and GV-RX26T256H use the Nvidia 8600 GT and ATI HD 2600 XP GPUs, respectively.

As for driving your display at its native resolution, this is an issue that many media PC enthusiasts face, especially with wide XGA displays. Resolutions of 1,360x768 are normally possible in most graphics drivers (at least those from Nvidia), although displays with 1,366x768 resolutions can prove trickier.

If the graphics driver doesn't offer the desired resolution, you may be able to force it using the Powerstrip utility (http://entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm), although there's no guarantee your TV will like the signal.

You may also find restrictions with the HDMI interface, in which case you'll have to compare the quality of HDMI with scaling against an analogue connection without scaling.