Not your average PC

I've seen many home theater setups filled with state-of-the-art equipment, sporting LCD screens, brushed aluminum or black faces, and little handles on the side of components - in other words, aesthetically pleasing. Most PCs on the other hand are boxy, beige mini and mid towers, hardly in the same league as the refined finish of AV stock.

Winbest sees this problem, and has housed the Dreamer 2000 in a slim desktop case, charcoal in color, with a large "IR port" type faceplate, similar to the eyeball of HAL-9000. This plastic cover shields the IR sensors for the wireless keyboard and remote. You didn't think you were going to need to get a few more keyboard and mouse extension cables did you?

The Dreamer 2000 is about the size of a compact VCR, and it fits in perfectly with an average home AV setup. Of course, your more snobbish friends will not be as impressed with this machine as they may be with Adcom amps, Rotel CD players, or Panamax line conditioners. Final verdict on the appearance: cute but not gorgeous -- assuming that you really don't spend all day in front of a computer.

Removing the screws

Internally, the machine is also fairly well designed. After removing four screws and taking a peek inside, we found a K6-2 CPU with a very large heat sink and fan in a ZIF socket, a 32mb SDRAM DIMM with an additional empty slot, with standard PCI cards for the video and DVD support.

Through a set of intricate loop back cables and a proprietary daughter board, the end-user only sees a clean set of ports in the rear for the video outputs and needs not concern himself with clunky loop back cables. While this does make it easier to hook up the cables and also allows Winbest to easily upgrade the components, the internal cables can add noise to the outgoing video signal preventing you from having the best quality.