The eMachines brand started life as a budget Internet sales PC company which flourished for a while but was snapped up in 2004 by Gateway. Its PCs are now sold through major retailers like PC World, Staples, Comet and Asda.

This E4038 is a Media Center PC, complete with TV tuner, but is sold without a monitor, so you'll need to add that cost onto the price of the machine. Since many people will wire the system into a projector or other home cinema display, this is a sensible approach by the company.

For a £500 machine, the E4038 has a strong specification. Inside its neat, black and silver case, with the trademark blue LEDs around its power button, it's built around a Pentium 4 524. This runs at 3.06GHz, has 1MB of level 2 cache and a 533MHz frontside bus. Couple that to 1GB of main memory, a 200GB hard drive and a multi-format DVD rewriter and you have most of the ingredients of a well-balanced, performance PC. The only component that doesn't fit the mix is the graphics card.

It's an Nvidia GeForce 6200, hardly a gamers' choice in graphics cards. 3DMark 06 produced an index of 197, which reflects that, but this machine is much more about 2D performance than 3D. As a Media Center PC, it's more likely to be used for watching TV or playing back DVD movies than it is for playing any of Tom Clancy's masterpieces.

As a Media Center PC, it does fairly well. Like all Media Centers, it has a TV tuner card, but it's an analogue card with a single tuner. This means you're limited to four or five terrestrial channels and you may lose even those when the analogue transmitters start being turned off in 2008. A 35-plus channel digital tuner would have been a lot more future-proof.

The machine is easy to use and includes readers for all the main memory cards, including sD and MicroDrive, and has a single USB socket at the front. Inside, the system is reasonably tidy, with a large diameter fan cooling the processor via a circular duct and a second fan on the back. All fans shut down when the system's in standby mode, and even when it's running it's commendably quiet.

As well as Microsoft Windows Media Center, the E4038 comes with a copy of Works 8, which provides word processor, spreadsheet, database and PIM (Personal Information Manager) for home or small office use. PowerDVD, Nero and a 90-day trial of McAfee Internet Security Suite are also pre-installed.

The eMachines E4038 is a Media Center PC at a good price, but you get what you pay for. The graphics card doesn't provide strong 3D performance and there's no monitor. Although the TV tuner includes FM radio reception, it's a single, analogue TV tuner, which will limit its life if you live in an early digital switch-over area.