Refine search for PCs

  Leave a comment      Email this to a friend TrustedReviews Newsletters

The screen supplied by Sony with our review unit is an optional extra.
Click to Enlarge
Click to Enlarge
Click to Enlarge

We have seen a lot of Media PCs at TrustedReviews in the last few months and the race to get the desktop away from the bedroom and into the living room has taken significant strides in that time. But what could be better than a PC that handles all your media needs in the living room, yet still resides in the bedroom? That is the proposal of style merchant Sony, with its top of the line RZ504.

Imagine the typical nuclear family where dad can work in his study while mum, sat in the living room, uses her television to view holiday photos direct from dad’s PC. At the same time, Junior and his friends upstairs are watching last night’s video recordings while his angst ridden older brother blasts music on his laptop, all of it again sourced from dad’s PC. Well, apart from creating a fractured home environment where no one needs to talk to each other anymore, this scenario shows exactly what the RZ504 can do. It provides complete, and potentially wireless, freedom to share stored media from a single hard drive all over the house without drilling walls and floorboards. In essence, a Media PC which – just like junior – does not have to be seen, to be heard.

Now that doesn’t mean the RZ504 is ugly, this is a Sony machine after all, and though I have had a couple of comments suggesting the tower looks like it was chopped in half and glued back together, its silver minimalist finish and near silent running would be an elegant addition to any room, perhaps barring a living room – and this, after all, is Sony’s point.

So how has Sony done this? Well, to break it down into its simplest parts: by bundling together a high powered desktop PC with a Network Media Receiver (a small silver box with remote control that plugs directly into a television or video to allow it to receive the hard drive content) and a wireless 802.11g Ethernet converter (that allows the two units to communicate wirelessly, as well as letting you add any other Ethernet enabled devices wirelessly to the network). Sony has also thrown in a wireless Type II PC Card which can slot into a laptop or the RZ504, depending on your own individual home setup.

Putting all this lot together is no mean feat, and while the manual tries to offer help on a wide range of possible configurations, none are particularly well fleshed out and amateurs will have their hands full. Which makes it particularly handy that Sony will come and install the device in your home should you wish. And once up and running, you will see the RZ504 provides a powerful home multimedia experience.

Incidentally, it is interesting to note that Sony is running Windows XP Home here rather than Windows Media Centre but media operation is not difficult via keyboard, mouse or the supplied IR remote control thanks to Sony’s own customised menus and wizard based software.

The performance of the PC itself is also unlikely to disappoint with Sony combining a slew of top quality components. Driving the machine is Intel’s latest P4 3.4GHz Northwood processor with 800MHz Front Side Bus (FSB), 1GB of 400MHz DDR RAM, a 250GB Western Digital 7,200rpm hard drive and a 128MB Radeon 9600XT graphics card.

Add your comment