Evesham's ebox2 won a Budget Buy award in our Media Center PC Labs test in Shopper May 2006, so we were pleased to see its successor, the ebox3 Plus. It's one of the cheaper Media Center PCs we've seen, costing £100 less than the ebox2.
Like its predecessor, it has a twin digital TV tuner, so you can record one Freeview channel while watching another. There's a 250GB hard disk, which should give you plenty of room to record TV, as well as build up a healthy collection of music and photos. Dedicated telly addicts can replace the hard disk with a larger model, although this is a bit more fiddly than it would be with a standard tower PC. We encountered no problems when viewing our HD Windows Media Video files.
The ebox3 looks and feels expensive thanks to its black brushed metal fascia and slot-loading DVD writer and was the subject of several admiring glances in our labs. There's an excellent range of outputs, including SCART, S-video, component, D-sub and DVI. However, you'll be disappointed if you want to use the ebox3 to record video from a non-TV source, such as a VCR or old analogue video camera, as there aren't any S-video in or composite video in ports.
We were a little disappointed by the ebox3's performance in our benchmarks. This is due to the underpowered Athlon 64 3000+ processor and just 512MB of RAM, 64MB of which is taken up by the onboard ATI Radeon Xpress 200. The integrated graphics mean that the ebox3 is unsuitable for games, failing our Doom 3 and Call of Duty 2 tests.
You should have no trouble connecting surround-sound speakers and a surround-sound amplifier to the ebox3. It has support for 7.1 surround sound and a coaxial S/PDIF output, so you can connect it to a dedicated surround-sound decoder. In addition to the Microsoft Media Center remote, there's a standard desktop wireless keyboard and mouse, although we would have preferred Microsoft's dedicated Media Center keyboard. We also wish there were a front-mounted LCD for displaying CD and DVD track and media file information. WiFi is present for accessing the internet and media stored on other PCs and network media players, and there's 10/100 Ethernet if you have a wired network.
If you're looking for a media centre PC for use in conjunction with another, more powerful PC, the ebox3 Plus is an inexpensive choice. It's excellent value and comes with all the connectors you'll want. It's a little underpowered if you want to use it as your main PC, though. If you're after a better all-rounder that can also be used as a main PC, Hi-Grade's DMS II 3200 is a better choice.
MEDIA CENTER PC AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 512MB RAM, 250GB hard disk, ATI Radeon Xpress 200 integrated graphics, DVD+/-RW +/-DLAuthor: Alan Lu
Evesham ebox3 Plus