Verdict: A small but not particularly quiet media pc
When you remove Aria's AXL Media Center from the box, it's instantly surprising. It's housed in the Hiper Media Chassis, a case we reviewed in April 2005. It's been a while since we've seen it and, in the flesh, it's still startlingly slim and sleek. It's only 55mm tall, and with the obvious signs such as USB ports hidden behind a pop-down plastic flap, it's difficult to tell that the AXL is a PC at all.
To connect the AXL to a TV, Aria supplies an S-Video cable and 3.5mm mini-jack to dual phono audio cable. Both of these plug into the back of the AXL, and then into a SCART adaptor that you then connect to your TV's SCART port. Annoyingly, you can't plug the AXL directly into the TV; instead, you first have to power it up with it connected to a computer monitor, and then tell the graphics driver to use the TV as a display. There are no instructions telling less experienced users how to do this, which is a bit of an oversight. It might not look like a PC, but the AXL certainly displays all the fidgety behaviour you're accustomed to from your favourite midi-tower.
This is a minor annoyance though. Where the AXL is most PC-like is in terms of noise. Although the Hiper chassis is designed for a micro-ATX motherboard, its slim dimensions mean that it's supplied with its own custom CPU HSF and built-in PSU. The fan on the HSF, and the 50mm exhaust fan that keeps the PSU cool aren't quiet. In an office environment, there wouldn't be much to complain about in terms of the noise produced by the AXL, but in the lounge, the noise it generates is certainly noticeable.
The micro-ATX board used in the AXL is made by Optronix, and it's based around the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. This isn't ATi's latest or greatest chipset by any means, and it's no surprise that, given the AXL's price, Aria has concentrated on budget components.
Although the Radeon Xpress 200 has a single 16x PCI-E slot, this isn't used inside the AXL. Instead, graphics are provided by the integrated Radeon X300 GPU in the chipset. As well as the S-Video output that Aria expects you to use, there's also a D-SUB connection. As the board is modestly priced, there's no DVI output, and people lucky enough to own a massive HDTV will find this disappointing. Also putting a downer on the output side is the audio; it's 6-channel AC97, and there are only analogue, PC-style connectors. If you have a surround-sound setup, it's incredibly frustrating that there's no coaxial or optical S/PDIF output.
The Optronix board is a Socket 754 model, and the CPU is the AMD Sempron 3100+. This CPU was a favourite of ours when we reviewed it at the end of 2004. At stock speeds, it runs at a meagre 1.8GHz, but we managed to overclock our sample to 2.43GHz. It's still a solid budget choice, and its cheaper 2800+ sibling plays a role in one of our £250 PCs this issue. There's only 512MB of PC3200 DDR memory, but it's supplied as a single DIMM, so upgrading won't be tricky.
The hard disk is surprisingly capacious, as it's a 200GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10. It's a S-ATA II drive, but you won't get the benefits of S-ATA II or NCQ, as the Optronix board uses ATi's old SB400 Southbridge. The optical drive is a trendy slot-fed model from Lite-On that can burn DVD+R9 discs at 2.4x and DVD+Rs at 8x speed. A single TV tuner is supplied in the shape of a PCI Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T, which didn't fare too well in our Labs test - it finished last. However, this was due to Hauppauge's own dated software; in XP MCE 2005, it's a decent DVB-T tuner.
Aria has opted to use Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 to power the AXL, and has bundled both the Microsoft XP MCE remote and wireless keyboard. Both of these peripherals are excellent, which isn't surprising, given Microsoft's excellent track record with controller hardware - the Xbox 360 joypad is the best game controller out there. XP MCE 2005 is a fine piece of user interface design; it isn't quite as refined/sophisticated as the Xbox 360 dashboard, but it's easy to get to grips with. Experienced Windows XP users might find it frustrating that tinkering options can be a little difficult to uncover but, in general, this is a decent compromise, as it means that non-PC enthusiasts will find getting to grips with XP MCE 2005 easy.
PERFORMANCE
Just as nobody buys a Pussycat Dolls single for the singing, nobody buys a media PC for its speed. As expected, the AXL's performance in our benchmarks was similar to a couch potato's 100m-sprint time: pretty slow. If you've just been reading the coverage of the Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme, then the AXL's overall score of 0.44 probably looks dreadful, but the AXL suffers not just from its CPU, but also its lack of memory. The PC was massively slowed down by the 512MB of memory in our benchmarks. The Sempron 3100+ is dated, but it's still capable of keeping XP MCE 2005 ticking over. The AXL also isn't helped by the fact that the on-board GPU steals 64MB for itself, so upgrading the system to 1GB might be a good idea, especially after the inevitable cluttering-up of the disk after a few months of use.
Despite the fact that the Optronix motherboard is clearly focused on media PC applications, the BIOS offers a decent spread of overclocking options. You can raise the FSB from 200MHz to 300MHz, as well as overvolting the RAM and the Northbridge. Unfortunately, despite these options, we weren't able to overclock the AXL at all. This isn't a major issue though; some extra performance would have been nice, but overclocking would also increase the amount of waste heat generated by the CPU.
CONCLUSION
One of the big problems with the media PC idea has been cost, especially since Freeview PVRs offer TV recording functions for around £100. However, at under £500, the AXL is a worthy alternative, especially as it can play computer video files, music and DVDs, as well as recording TV.
The AXL is missing a significant number of features - optical audio and HDMI and DVI video outputs - but this is par for the course, given its low price. It's similar to the media PC we built in the 'PCs for Peanuts' feature, although we used a SilverStone Lascala case for that system. This case is bigger than the Hiper, and it allows you to add a separate graphics card for high-quality video output and, more importantly, use a quieter HSF and PSU. If you don't want to build a media PC then the AXL is worth considering, as it's cheap. Ultimately, however, we feel that although its slim dimensions make it look more at home with lounge electronics, they limit its ability to behave as though it belongs there.
