Digital Trends

Personal computers are complex, beastly machines compared to plug-and-play devices like a DVD player or a TiVo. Cirgon’s Encore Digital Media Server is the latest attempt to tame the animal and reduce it to an acquiescent consumer electronics product. The Encore has more than a few whiz-bang features, but power users will be disappointed by several design compromises.

Unlike most PCs that would like to take up residence in your living room—Dell’s XPS One or HP’s TouchSmart, for instance—this one doesn’t rely on any form of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Cirgon instead designed an entirely custom graphical user interface and laid it on top of the Linux operating system. And by avoiding the excess baggage that comes with Windows, Cirgon was able to build a PC using simpler components that consume considerably less power.

Lower power consumption means less heat production, which in turn reduces the need for noisy fans. HP’s TouchSmart IQ506 PC is a fairly quiet, low-power computer, yet when we plugged it into a Kill-a-Watt power meter the TouchSmart registered electrical consumption of 85 watts when idle and 95 watts while ripping a CD (a task that taps the CPU, the hard drive, and the optical drive). Compare that to the Encore, which consumed just 30 watts while idle and about 48 watts while ripping a CD.