A media center PC can be expensive, even if you build one yourself. What do you really want from such a machine? Primarily, you'd probably like to store media on its hard drive to play through your home entertainment center. If you don't need other typical media center functionality, such as digital video recording and channel guides, the MediaGate MG-350HD might be the device you're looking for.

 Sort of a souped-up media extender, the MG-350HD is roughly the size of a Nintendo Wii console. It comes with wired and wireless networking, support for all kinds of televisions and stereo systems, and a hollow area into which you can install a hard drive. That's right—it doesn't come with storage, so you'll have to factor in the cost of an IDE drive and add it to the price of the MG-350HD, but on the bright side you can toss in as much or as little storage space as you need. The device has been tested with drives as large as 750GB.

The MG-350HD can stream media from a networked PC and play files from its own internal hard drive or an external, USB storage device. Armed with a hard drive, it can also function as a NDAS (Network Direct Attached Storage) device.

The obvious question is: How well does it do all that stuff? We put an MG-350HD through its paces to find out, and we were pleasantly surprised by its abilities.

Looking at its specs, including highlights added through firmware revisions, we were so impressed by its range of features that we were surprised that the MediaGate MG-350HD couldn't also make us coffee and butter up a bagel.

It supports a huge range of audio, video and image file formats, and gets them to your entertainment center in a variety of ways. While some closed-standard formats are missing (notably Real and QuickTime), most of the open standards are accounted for, including some surprising ones like Ogg Vorbis.

Firmware upgrades are a cinch; we just dropped the new firmware on a USB flash drive and connected it to the MG-350HD and navigated its menu to update it. MediaGate recommends updating the firmware through a direct USB attachment as opposed to a network transfer to prevent a possible interruption in the update. We did find that the device is picky about which USB flash drives it works with; it locked up when we plugged in a 2GB Kingston, but was happy with a 16MB SanDisk.

You can connect the MG-350HD to pretty much any type of television and stereo system with its wide variety of connectors. Plug it into a standard-def television with an included composite or s-video cable; or provide your own cable to connect it to a high-def widescreen TV via component or HDMI connectors. 

 Meanwhile, for audio, you can use old school RCA stereo for output, or digital connections including coax and optical. The component cable also includes stereo RCA connectors (it's one of those three-wire red/white/yellow multimedia cables) for stereo connections, but you'll have to supply your own coax or optical wiring if you want digital audio output.

For network connectivity, you can introduce it to your other computers via a 10/100 wired connection or through Wi-Fi.

While the MG-350HD doesn't need a hard drive to function (it can stream media to the entertainment center without one), you'll miss out on the NDAS support—and a networked media storage center—if you don't install one. The device support for SATA drives.

This is where the MG-350HD stumbles. With one of the limpest instruction manuals—er, pamphlets—in the history of computing, setup was pretty much a process of trial and error. 

 Installing a hard drive is a snap if you have any experience at all tinkering with PCs, or installing drives in other NAS devices. The MG-350HD slides open easily after you remove four screws, and then you must remove a hard drive mounting plate. A few screw turns later, and you're in business. 

 The downside comes in setting up the device for your network and your home theater. Lacking an HTML interface, you can't set it up through a browser as you would most NAS devices; instead, you must connect it to a display of some sort, power it up, and click the TV-Out button on its remote until the display finds a useable signal.

The remote, meanwhile, is your primary interface with the MG-350HD. Unfortunately, it's not a universal remote and thus works only with the MG-350HD.

The setup pages are ugly and counterintuitive. Entering a wireless network key, for instance, proved to be excruciatingly difficult; how do you enter letters with a remote control? With the arrow buttons, of course. How could we not know that? 

 The device proved to be quite slow in some cases. It took quite a while to boot up (21 seconds without a hard drive, and 50 with a 120GB ATA/100 drive installed).

Once you get the hang of the tricky setup system, you'll find you have domain over lots of options, from wired and wireless networking (even ad-hoc mode is supported) and picture slide show timing to the screen's aspect ratio and even the blue LED on the device itself, which you can turn off if you wish.

With the MediaGate MG-350HD in place near your entertainment center, and somehow connected to your network, you have two options for enjoying media. You can either copy it to the hard drive in the unit, if you installed one, or stream it from your PC. Getting the MG-350HD to do either is easier than the setup process.

The unit can handle displays of all shapes and sizes. You can configure it for PAL or NTSC televisions, and resolutions ranging from old standard digital (480p) to full on high def (1080p) and everything in between (720p, 1080i, and PC monitor resolutions including 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200).

Streaming media at the higher definitions was sometimes problematic. At a distance of about 20 feet from the Wi-Fi router, with one wall in between the router and the MG-350HD, the wireless signal degraded to around 80% of its maximum. Music files sounded fantastic, photo slideshows were fine, but 1080i video files were mildly choppy. That was easily alleviated by using an Ethernet cable and streaming the files through twisted pair. This just demonstrates the weakness of 802.11g for high definition transfers.

We also tried sharing a DVD drive on the PC and playing DVDs from the MG-350HD, and that worked well both wirelessly and wired. Less taxing, lower resolution video files streamed perfectly. Streaming performance over a wireless network depends heavily on the signal strength between the MG-350HD and the router; as the signal degrades, media files encounter more skipping and stuttering. At a distance of perhaps 100 feet, even music files ripped at 128kbps encountered problems.