Evesham Teramedia

Evesham's latest system is so new that when it arrived at PCW it didn't even have a name. The company sent an email to us asking for suggestions. A few seconds later, the Teramedia was born.

The Teramedia shares a case with the Decimator but, unlike that system, it is aimed at the Media Center market rather than gamers. It has a pair of digital TV tuners and a Raid array, consisting of three 400GB hard disks, that provides a huge 1.2TB of storage (excluding a separate 250GB Maxtor system drive).

At the heart of the system is a Pentium 4 660, clocked at 3.6GHz, complemented by an MSI i925XE motherboard and 1GB of dual-channelmemory. The Teramedia's ATI X850XT Platinum Edition graphics can handle even Half-Life 2 at high levels of detail without too much difficulty. It also managed a respectable 58fps in Far Cry and an excellent 4,145 in 3Dmark2005. However, the machine's Sysmark score of 200 was a little less than we expected from such a highly specified PC.

The Teramedia comes with Media Center 2005, making it easy to watch and record TV, play DVDs and listen to music. The dual TV tuners are designed for Freeview and let you record one show while watching another or record two programmes.
With mpeg2 compression, the Teramedia's big storage capacity means you could record around a month's worth of television without running out of space. With better compression, such as DivX, this increases.

Interestingly, the three Seagate Sata drives are stacked together in a Raid 0 configuration (striped), without fault tolerance. This gives you the best performance but it's important to note that, should one of the drives fail, you stand to lose some of the data. To back up recordings, you get a Sony dual-layer DVD burner and there's a separate DVD drive.

The front also houses a 7-in-1 memory card reader, which can be ejected from the case and used as a standalone product, and a floppy disk drive. While the latter may seem redundant on a system such as this, it's needed for the Raid configuration software.

The system sports a pair of USB sockets under a flap on the top of the case, with a headphone socket, microphone socket and Firewire port. At the back are four more USB connectors and another Firewire port, plus serial, parallel, keyboard and mouse ports. For external communication, there's a 56K modem and two network ports on the front panel, should you need to use the PC as a router.

A Viewsonic 19in flat-screen TFT and set of Creative surround speakers complement all this rather well. Although a touch noisier than traditional AV kit, this PC wouldn't look out of place in the living room, at least for those who have brushed metal silver TVs and VCRs. However, it would work very well as a home media server that can be positioned elsewhere.