Zotac ZBox Blu-Ray AD03 Plus

Zotac Zbox AD03BR-PLUS-U

If you're in the market for a home theater PC but you don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars more than you have to, then you might be the target audience for the Zotac Zbox AD03BR-PLUS-U. Priced at $519.99 (list), it gives you just what you need to augment your entertainment setup, and absolutely nothing else. You'll need to put in a bit of additional work (and perhaps some additional money) to get the Zbox up and running. But if you're up to it you can get a decent system, as well as one that can play high-definition Blu-ray discs, at a decent price. How does Zotac keep the costs down? Primarily and predictably: by keeping the components as simple as possible. The Zbox is based on AMD's E-350 Fusion APU, a motherboard-CPU combo that offers two "Bobcat" processing cores running at 1.6 GHz, with an integrated AMD Radeon HD 6310 GPU running at 500 MHz. It's also preloaded with 2GB of DDR3-1066 RAM, a 250GB hard drive, and, most intriguingly for a system at this price, an internal Blu-ray combo drive. A Gigabit Ethernet jack, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and a nice array of additional ports (one USB 2.0, one USB 3.0, headphone and microphone, and a multiformat card reader on the front panel; HDMI, DVI, USB 3.0, eSATA/USB 2.0 combo, and S/PDIF out) offer a full complement of connectivity options.