Advent DHE 1000

If Media Centers are to be accepted into the lounge environment, they have to be stylishly designed.

Thanks to the bulky design and old-fashioned green LED screen, Advent’s DHE 1000 will be the ugly duckling of your entertainment setup. A range of ports are hidden by a flap on the front of the unit, including a multi-format card reader and various audio and video sockets.

Adequate processing power is provided by a 3GHz P4, which is backed up by 1GB of Ram, while graphics are handled by an Nvidia Geforce 6600; a mid-range card that lets you play most games, albeit at low resolution and detail settings.

The storage-hungry nature of recorded video means Media Center PCs require plenty of hard disk space. Advent supplies a low but acceptable 250GB drive with the DHE 1000 along with a dual-layer DVD burner.

An Avermedia dual tuner lets you watch one channel while recording another or record two programmes at the same time. As this is an analogue tuner, you won’t be able to get Freeview channels unless you hook up an additional digital tuner.

Various options are available when connecting the DHE 1000 to a display. Both DVI and VGA monitor outputs are offered along with S-video and composite. Disappointingly, there’s no Scart socket but, along with a host of other cables, a composite to Scart adapter is included.

Should you have surround-sound speakers, the 7.1 audio outputs will be welcome. Both optical and coaxial digital audio outputs are also available, along with a standard analogue stereo alternative.

We’d advise giving the DHE 1000 plenty of breathing space as the quiet cooling system means it gets fairly hot during use.

This is a good-value Media Center PC, but Advent could have done a far better job with the aesthetics, while a digital tuner option is also required.