SHINY VIDEO REVIEW: Emtec S800 HDD Movie Cube

Over Christmas I ate a lot of turkey, drank a lot of wine, and fiddled endlessly with this – the Emtec S800 movie cube. I’ll break it to you now – it’s not a cube – but it is a great little home entertainment set-top-box that lets you stream video over a network and record television.

Not one for the technophobic amongst you, but if you like tinkering with your AV setup then it comes highly recommended. It costs £230 and the company claims it’s available now from Dixons, but I certainly can’t see it on the site, or anywhere else for that matter. If you know where you can buy it in the UK, drop us a line in the comments.

Related posts: Emtec S800 HDD Movie Cube – an all-in-one digital media set-top-box | Emtec launches Movie Cube-R multimedia centre

SHINY VIDEO: Quad vs Dual – how many cores do you really need?

Just before Christmas, Dan and I took delivery of a dual core and a quad core machine, and we thought we’d see if it’s actually worth putting four cores into your computer, rather than two. We ran four processor-intensive concurrent tasks – a virusscan, a DVD encode, a 3D game, and then we measured how long it took to unzip a zip file.

The results? Well, you’ll have to watch the video to find out. I’ll just say that I was surprised by the outcome. Let us know your experiences of Quad core vs Dual core chips in the comments below.

Related posts: Rock adds Intel’s Q9000 quad-core chip to its Xtreme 780 gaming laptop | Asus launches quad-core gaming laptop – claims ‘fastest in the UK’

Sci-fi world devastated – Patrick McGoohan and Ricardo Montalban pass away

Patrick McGoohan, made famous by his role in bewildering 60s sci-fi escapology show The Prisoner, died on Tuesday, aged 80.

He was great in Danger Man, made his name in The Prisoner, then continued to deliver entertainment beyond the call of duty by directing and starring in numerous episodes of Columbo between the 1970s and his last directorial appearance in 2000…