Generally speaking, home PCs running Media Center Edition 2005 are shrinking. Today, they're more likely to resemble conventional DVD players than typical desktop computers.

However, new UK PC-brand Lewis has adopted a different approach. It has produced a media centre solution for AV enthusiasts who like their high-end kit as big and sturdy as possible. Its Silverstone casing is a beefy, 1mm-thick steel box with a brushed aluminium front panel that's a better match, aesthetically, to Chord, Lexicon and top-of-the-range Denon kit than a super-slim DVD deck.

Actually, there's good reason for the girth. Firstly, the extra space offers better cooling, reducing internal and external heat while operating at an almost inaudible noise level of 21dB, thanks to cunningly placed fans. Secondly, unlike many of the anorexic media centres available, it has room for future upgrades. Which is not to say you don't get a stack of the very latest cards and processors in the 'off-the-shelf' version.

The MC800 is so called because the machine features an 800GB hard drive (alternate versions are the MC400 and MC1200, with equivalent hard-disk space), allowing for up to 750 hours of recorded footage at the lowest quality bitrate (taking into account the operating system and other preinstalled software), or 250 hours at broadcast quality.

It has a dedicated graphics card, the Geforce 6800GT (many media centre PCs fix the graphics processor to the motherboard). This is ideal for media applications, including DVD video upscaling and advanced adaptive de-interlacing, through an independent on-chip video processor capable of 1920 x 1080i resolution without tying up the main CPU. In fact, the card is capable of displaying resolutions of 2048 x 1536 - more than the ATI 9800, adopted by many other media PCs, could dream of. Of course, no commercial flatpanel screen can match this. Another benefit of using this NVidea card is that its settings are accessible from within MCE 2005, rather than having to exit to Windows each time.

The MC800 also features an AMD Athlon 64bit 3000 processor, 1024MB DDR 400MHz memory, two Black Gold DVB-T digital TV tuners, in-built Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, onboard DTS and Dolby Digital audio decoding and a dual-layer DVD burner/reader; compare that spec to Denon's comparatively-priced A1-XV DVD player. Makes you think doesn't it?