For those of you not swamped by tax return gubbins – we’ll shamelessly plug our ‘How to avoid tax return hell‘ feature at this point – it’s been a PC-centric week on reviews, but with some interesting variations on the usual black box design.

All-in-one PCs and Phenomenal CPUs

The Mesh Matrix II was a traditional PC, but inside sat one of AMD’s brand new Phenom II processors. We put it through its paces and it blew the old Phenoms away; it’s not up there with the recent Core i7s from Intel, but the price makes it a real competitor. The Mesh PC it came in was pretty special too, earning six stars out of six in our review. The same could not be said of the Core i7-based Dell Studio XPS 435mt, which failed to impress us at all.

We had two PCs with integrated displays, both from PC World brand Advent, both interesting in different ways. The Advent AIO100 is the company’s net-top offering, with a bigger screen and a more grown-up design than the child-like Asus Eee Top. It’s Atom-powered, so not a speed-demon, but of the short list of net-tops we’ve seen it’s the best yet.

Then we had the Advent AIO200, a larger and dearer beast at £766 plus VAT, but with plenty more to offer. It had more style than we expected, a quad-core processor and a decent spec, so it actually surprised us by being really quite appealing. Whether it could knock our current A List champion from its throne was a different question entirely, though.

Peripherals and Google

Elsewhere we saw NEC go all green with its EA261WM monitor. With a 26in screen it might be a stretch to call it one for the environmentally conscious, but a gimmicky carbon footprint calculator encourages a lower brightness setting. It’s easily ignored – and probably will be by most people – but credit to NEC for trying something. As for the screen, we liked it but not enough to recommend.

We also got to play with Google Apps Premier Edition – is now the time to ditch your powerful apps and move everything online? Short answer: No. And we saw external hard disks from Memorex and Verbatim, as well as the stylish new Pure Avanti Flow internet radio.