The Medion M3Director 5100 is a gray minitower that would suit a den or a small home office. Even with integrated sound--no fancy audio card here--the M3Director still packs plenty of aural punch. The unit can handle surround sound, though our configuration included only a 2.1-channel speaker system with a mini-subwoofer. The latter sounds great; you can control it with a volume wheel on the multimedia keyboard.
In every other respect, the M3Director is a fully functional Windows Media Center PC equipped with a TV and FM tuner (and a basic FM antenna); it was one of the few units in our roundup that could quickly find radio stations. An analog-only Medion MD7319 19-inch LCD came with our test system, even though it includes DVI for a digital LCD.
Fairly compact, the M3Director measures 14 inches tall, 7 inches wide, and 16.8 inches deep. Its attractive black front panel features a multiformat DVD burner, a separate 16X DVD-ROM drive, and a media bay of additional slots and ports protected by a sliding door, which is one of this unit's coolest features. When released, it glides down out of sight into the case, revealing an eight-in-one memory card reader, a floppy drive, two of the unit's six USB ports, and a slew of audio/video-in and -out ports, ranging from a headphone jack to your choice of a four-pin or a powered six-pin FireWire port for downloading from your camcorder. At the base of the unit, backlit reminder icons identify your current activity--playing a DVD, watching TV, or listening to music.
The $1599 M3Director earned a WorldBench 5 score of 80, placing it last in the group and 11 percent below the average. The unit came equipped with the slowest processor, a 3-GHz Pentium 4 530 (same as the Gateway 820GM), and 512MB of RAM.
Available at Best Buy and Costco, this inexpensive minitower system covers the basics well. Only relatively slow performance holds it back.
Carla Thornton
