RL Supplies Modula Mini 5200 review

RL Supplies’ Modula Mini 5200 uses Intel’s 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo E5200 processor, making it one of the more powerful PCs here. A whopping 4GB of memory makes its price look even more appealing. The case doesn’t look as brutally utilitarian as Novatech’s Ion or Eclipse’s EcoPC, but our review sample had a few sharp, unfinished edges, both inside and out. Inside the case, you’ll find an Intel DG45FC mini-ITX motherboard. This is an excellent starting point for a Media Center PC, as it includes 7.1 analogue and digital surround-sound outputs and an on-board graphics processor with both HDMI and DVI ports. The motherboard has a single PCI Express x1 slot, which has been fitted with a dual Freeview TV tuner, so you can watch one digital channel while recording another. The motherboard doesn’t have a built-in infrared receiver, so RL Supplies has provided a USB receiver to go with the bundled Media Center remote. To make the best use of your PC’s recording capabilities, you’ll need somewhere to store everything you’ve captured, which is where the massive 750GB hard disk comes in. The only extra feature we could have wanted was a Blu-ray drive. This PC accepts standard desktop components, so upgrading is a simple matter of buying a BD-ROM drive for around £70. The graphics card can decode Blu-ray movies, so this PC will cope easily with playing movies. RL Supplies has succeeded in building a PC that’s both compact and sufficiently powerful for most tasks. Unfortunately, although its active and idle power consumption figures of 73W and 50W aren’t completely awful, its standby consumption of 7W is higher than those of most standard PCs, so you should switch it off when it’s not in use.

Despite this, we were suitably impressed by the Modula Mini 5200’s value and compact design. If you want a low-power Media Center PC for recording TV programmes and playing media files, it’s a great choice. If you want Blu-ray playback as standard, Sony’s VGC-TP3E costs £71 more.