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A look at DISCover Part three: Apex

A look at DISCover Part three: Apex

Written by Charles Husemann on 6/30/2004 for
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GamingNexus: Apex is a relatively young company compared to the heavy weights out there, tell us a little about how the company was started and how you've grown through the past years.
Apex: Apex Digital’s co-founders, David Ji and Ancle Hsu were in the car stereo import business and had been hearing about the DVD phenomenon. They did research among their partners and elected to get into the market. Apex was fortunate enough to have Circuit City introduce the product on a national level giving Apex immediate credibility in the DVD market.

GamingNexus: The Apex name's got a good reputation with some of the internet buyers who scour for good DVD players that have unique features. What made you guys decide to jump into this new market?
Apex: The Internet buyers immediately picked up on the fact that the Apex DVD players had MP3 playback capability, a highly desirable feature. Apex was the first to incorporate MP3 in its DVD players

GamingNexus: How did you hear about the DISCover technology? Apex: DISCover approached Apex Digital. A “Drop and Play” PC game console had been a vision of one of our co-founders, Ancle Hsu for quite some time, but until DISCover brought us the technology we had not arrived at the solution. The ApeXtreme is the culmination of this vision.

GamingNexus: What is your target market for the ApeXtreme?
Apex: Certainly the casual gamer as it applies to the family entertainment experience.


GamingNexus: As usual the pricing on your products is pretty aggressive. The price for your unit is considerably less than other HTPCs. The components are different than the other HTPCs to help bring the cost down. How does this translate to performance for current high powered games such as Halo?
Apex: I believe your reference to HTPC implies Home Theater PC. If that is the case, this is not a full-featured entertainment PC, Apex does have plans for other generations of entertainment devices. GamingNexus: Tell us a little about the graphics chip and the CPU used in the units that are coming out. How do they compare to cards from ATI or NVIDIA and CPUs from Intel or AMD?
Apex: The ApeXtreme uses AMD’s Athlon XP2000+ processor chip, nVIDIA’s nForce2 IGP graphics processor and nVIDIA’s gForce4 MX graphics card.

GamingNexus: What program will Apex be using to control the PVR functions?
Apex: nVIDIA’s proprietary software

GamingNexus: What do you think the ApeXtreme has to offer over home built solutions?
Apex: Drop and Play capability and pre-installed scripting for the top 800 PC game programs.

GamingNexus: A few companies are using DISCover technology in producing HTPC systems, what makes your system stand out among the rest?
Apex: In line with Apex Digital’s market philosophy, it is a feature-rich technology product at affordable pricing that appeals to the mass consumer.

GamingNexus: Will the ApeXtreme system be user upgradable?
Apex: It will be software upgradable.

GamingNexus: Will the ApeXtreme support High Definition signals?
Apex: Yes

GamingNexus: The ApeXtreme has several different functions (Gaming PC, DVD player, DVR, etc)…what do you consider to be the most important feature of the device?
Apex: PC gaming

GamingNexus: When will the system be available for purchase?
Apex: Fourth quarter of 2004

* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.


About Author

Hi, my name is Charles Husemann and I've been gaming for longer than I care to admit. For me it's always been about competing and a burning off stress. It started off simply enough with Choplifter and Lode Runner on the Apple //e, then it was the curse of Tank and Yars Revenge on the 2600. The addiction subsided somewhat until I went to college where dramatic decreases in my GPA could be traced to the release of X:Com and Doom. I was a Microsoft Xbox MVP from 2009 to 2014.  I currently own stock in Microsoft, AMD, and nVidia.
 

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