All the week’s reviews

Friday, January 16th, 2009

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. (more…)

All the week’s reviews

Friday, December 12th, 2008

This week’s the reviews desk has been in a professional mood, with some high-end peripherals dominating proceedings.

The monstrous NEC MultiSync LCD3090WQXi was set up in the Labs for all of eight seconds before a drooling crowd had gathered to marvel at its stunning colour reproduction and ginormous 30in, 2,560 x 1,600 H-IPS panel. Yes, it’s a £1,400 investment, but if you compare it to the main professional-level competition we reckon it actually looks like quite a bargain.

Continuing the professional theme was the Epson Stylus Photo R2880, the flagship of its A3 range. Remarkably quiet in use, extremely simple to use and maintain, and using not one but three separate black inks (surely Light Light Black is just Grey?) it’s a photographer’s dream. Even at £357 plus VAT it’s a quality investment for any semi-pro.

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British system builders feeling the squeeze

Friday, December 12th, 2008

The impact of the credit crunch has been widespread and well-publicised: Woolworths has seen more customers through its doors in the past week than it had in the past year thanks to a price-busting closing down sale, and banks are either collapsing or being nationalised at a fearsome rate.

As always, though, an economic downturn has a profound effect at every level of society – even if they don’t make the headlines. The IT industry, for instance, is feeling the haunting presence of the current crisis. In particular, system builders are feeling the squeeze as component prices rocket – and we’ve asked several of them for their thoughts on the future and how they’re planning to cope.

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