Life|Ware Shows Quad-Recording Media Center with Four CableCARDs

Life|Ware rolled out what it says is the first media centre PC running four CableCARDs at the same time, and it proved to us that the whole thing actually works today at CEDIA 07. Its life|media Media Centre PC is the new top of the line for the company, and it’s packing an Intel Quad Core processor, 4GB of RAM and 4TB of storage for a cool $15K. The money shot? It can record four HD channels while it’s streaming HD video to four Xbox 360 Elite boxes running the media centre extender at the same time. And, it does all this without even breathing hard.

See the performance monitor shots in the gallery above—it’s hardly working, using just 57% of its processing power while feeding and recording all that video. It’s doing that using NVIDIA’s highest-end graphics card, the 8800GTS (that’s DVI-only, but easily converted to HDMI).

We’re not sure who would really need to run four Xbox media extenders at the same time, recording all that stuff. Might be nice for a small hotel or a family with a dozen children. It was a fascinating engineering exercise nonetheless.