Introduction

Media PCs and media centres are becoming more and more common, especially with people losing a little faith in their stalwart desktop system. Today I’m looking at a rig from Cryo PC that looks to bridge the gap between traditional desktop and media centre, offering decent performance in a lounge setting, with some media features thrown in for good measure. I give you the Alto.

Because testing a system can take quite a while, this review is being split into two parts. This first one will focus on raw performance and synthetic testing, while Part 2 will be more gaming and subjective in nature.

Specifications

CPU: Intel i3 2100T
Motherboard: GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3
RAM: Corsair XMS3 4GB 1600MHZ
GPU: Zotac GT430
Storage: Corsair F40 40GB SSD, Seagate Barracuda 1TB LP
Case: Zalman HD503
TV Tuner: Black Gold BGT3595 Dual DVB-S/DVB-T
Sound: Onboard

Cryo’s Take on the Alto

“The Alto is designed to provide the optimum home theatre solution balancing form and function.  With it being the same size as a standard home theatre or hi-fi appliance and fitting into place where a regular DVD player, DigiBox, Video recorder or CD player might have been.  Yet it has the scope to accommodate a substantial amount of storage space (8TB or 10,000+ films and 8 million songs) and a number of expansion cards (PCI and PCIe).

With this its able to support multiple tuners, terrestrial and satellite (DVB-T and DVB-S), high end 3D graphics cards, a large amount of memory and multiple disk arrays for resilient and high speed storage (RAID).

It also comes with a standard remote and optional touch panel for convenience.  The remote can be integrated into a standard third party remote consolidation system such as Philips Pronto.”