The Okoro OMS-ZX100 certainly has its pros and cons. On the plus side, it is an extremely attractive piece of hardware, which packs a bit of a punch, on the downside you don’t get nearly enough bang for your buck as you are shelling out top dollar for a system that in most ways is merely mediocre. Home Theater PC buffs will tell you that the reason why you have to shell out so much hard earned dough is to get a well balanced system, which is silent.
To be silent would certainly be the reason for Okoro choosing a passively cooled 256MB 8600GT video card, and an 32GB SSD to run the O/S and core programs. There were, however, a few decisions on the part of Okoro that left me scratching my head. The CPU seems a little overblown for the system, why throw in an Intel QX6850 when the video card won’t really pass muster on the latest and greatest gaming titles. Is that extra processor power really going to be put to use. Why not opt for a much cheaper Q6600? Okoro also opted for a mere 3GB of RAM instead of four. Considering the price of DDR2 RAM these days, you have to ask yourself if they could have done a little better on that front. The third point was the inclusion of an HD-DVD/Blu-Ray/DVD combo drive for playback. Now that HD-DVD is officially extinct, it seems an unnceccessary expense.
My verdict, the Okoro OMS-ZX100 needs to decide what it is. If it is a gaming system, beef up the graphics processing specs, if it is an HTPC, tone down the processor and save us a few bucks. It does have HDMI out, which is a must for any HTPC and you can pick your choice of color.
A summary of the specs:
- Intel Coreâ„¢2 Extreme Quad Core Processor QX6850 3.0GHz
- 3 Gigabytes of Memory
- NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT HDMI output
- 32GB High Speed Solid State OS Drive with 1TB for Media Storage
- Blu-ray and HDDVD Playback
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
- Availability in ANY automotive color
Price: About $6,000 – more if you want Wi-Fi or a cable card.
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Tags: Computers, HTPC
2 responses
Apr 2, 2008 at 5:47 pm
3GB RAM is the most that XP can use
The faster the CPU the faster you can transcoding HD video, as it is very CPU intensive.
Apr 2, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Actually, if you use the x64 version of XP you have virtually limitless RAM potential. I can tell you right now that more RAM helps a great deal with the transcoding process and that a Q6600 gets the job done very nicely. It also works wonders with other things like creating disk images.
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