Pioneer Dreamvision VIIV Media Centre Mini PC

The traditional PC is not the most attractive addition to your lounge room, and so has limited effect in the entertainment arena. Very small form factor PCs still retain much of the power of larger machines but are much easy to hide, and are changing the role of the PC in the lounge room. One such machine is the Pioneer Dreamvision Mini PC. This tidy little unit can fulfil the role of personal computer, DVD player and digital TV tuner. The box can be used with a standard computer monitor or a TV with S-video support.

Design
The Dreamvision is a neat little black box styled much the same as an Apple Mac Mini. The Pioneer PC would keep a very low profile in your lounge and is certainly not unattractive to look at. On the front, there is a slot for optical disks rather than a traditional CD drawer. Ports and buttons needing ready access are present at the front of the machine below the CD/DVD slot.

Pioneer clearly doesn't want you poking around inside its machine and so there is no easy way in. Upgrades will need to be done by the suppliers themselves. In truth, there would be little room inside for anything more than a bit of extra RAM and a change of CPU or hard-drive. So try to get what you want to start with and avoid hardware upgrades.

Features
You can pick and choose what goes into you Mini EPC when you order it but as tested the machine contained an Intel T2450 Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 120GB Seagate HDD, Wireless LAN card, Bluetooth and Digital TV tuner. Also included free was a VoIP starter kit with $10 credit and a 1 month trial of IceTV program guide. The device also features a card slot which is capable of reading SD, MS, MS Pro and MMC formats.

Pioneer can preinstall OpenOffice (free) and a variety of Windows flavours, or even Ubuntu Linux if you prefer not to pay for your OS. This machine came with Windows Vista Home Premium edition installed and Cyberlink DVD Suite -- see below.

Video output is achieved via DVI (or VGA D-sub with adapter) for use with a computer monitor, or you can use a HDMI-to-DVI adaptor -- or even the S-video port -- to hook the machine up to your big widescreen TV.

The supplied Microsoft remote control is quite bulky and heavy, but the buttons are at least labelled in a meaningful fashion. Of course, you can also use the same control to control TV and CD/DVD functions, which can save a lot of confusion in trying to program a universal remote.You would need an awfully big lounge (and screen) for the remote to run out of range.

Performance
Windows Vista's own benchmark, the 'Windows Experience Index', rates the hardware at a base of 3.0. This is the minimum score recommended by Microsoft to run the full Aero desktop. The score is relatively low due to the Pioneer's graphics performance, which relies on the built-in Intel 945GM chipset. We also tested with PCMark 2005 and 3DMark 2006, and overall the scores spoke of a machine which we would describe as 'adequate'. Graphics performance was pretty ordinary with a paltry 223 3DMarks -- not suitable for serious gaming, but certainly capable of handling ordinary video/TV. The hard-drive access was slow, but memory and CPU performance were quite fair. Given the size of the machine you can't expect top of the range performance -- there simply isn't room for fancy graphics cards and the cooling systems required by really gutsy components.

Perhaps you were wondering why a machine running Vista Premium needs Cyberlink DVD Suite? We found it to be a recipe for disaster. If Cyberlink is used to play a DVD and then shut-down without stopping the DVD, the system gets itself in a knot. If you then try to watch a DVD with Media Centre you get a seriously corrupted image -- something to be wary of.

Overall, the prodigiously-named DreamVision VIIV Media Centre Mini PC is adequate for most purposes, but the word 'compromise' comes to mind. This is unfortunately the weakest of the sub-$2000 systems we looked at.