Elonex Artisan VX Viiv media centre PC

Viiv arrives in the UK

By Lars-Göran Nilsson • Get more from this author

12th May 2006 15:01 GMT

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Elonex has incorporated the IR receiver for the MCE remote control into the front of the Artisan VX, although there are two ports on the back to which further IR extenders can be attached if you want to keep the Artisan VX out of sight. The fascia also sports an LCD that tells you what channel you're watching and, if you're playing recorded content, it also shows how long you've been watching it.

Elonex_Artisan_VX_rear

Elonex supplies a wireless keyboard, and one designed to be used away from a desk at that. The shape is rather odd compared to a normal keyboard - it's got a handle on each side and there's a small joystick in the right-hand corner to use in place of a mouse. It takes a little getting used to, particularly for Windows use, but it's not that difficult. The only downside is that the keyboard uses a fairly large USB receiver.

You also get a variety of video and audio cables with the Artisan VX, all with s-video, composite-video, RCA, 3.5mm, DVI or SCART connectors, along with some adaptors to interconnect them. There's no HDMI cable or port here, so if your HDTV has one, you'll need to buy a DVI-to-HDMI cable to connect it.

All in all, Elonex has put together quite an impressive package. During the time I've used the Artisan VX it has worked quite well. However, this was a pre-production unit so some features like the graphics card weren't fitted. The plastic protecting on the front-panel LED was also too dark for the screen to be easily read, but this has all been resolved, I understand.

I do have a couple of other concerns. The first one is related to Viiv. When you press the power button on the remote control the screen goes blank and the blue power LED indicator turns red. Standby mode, in other words, actually isn't a standby mode. It just turns the screen output off. This means the CPU fan is still going, and I found this could be quite annoying at times, especially when I just wanted to watch some TV. That said, watching a DVD on the Artisan VX with my surround sound set-up working proved more than enough to hide the fan noise.