Product Reviews

If you hear the words 'home PC', you could be forgiven for picturing a rather demure little box. Small, polite and unobtrusive. The word home, after all, conjures up images of tea, china and mother's fruitcake. However, Viglen's new HomePro PC is anything but a shrinking violet. Based on an 800MHz Pentium III, this PC is designed to go toe-to-toe with AMD's Athlon. Last month's Top 50 champion, the Atlas Meridian Athlon 850, will have a fight on its hands to retain its crown.

The 800MHz Pentium III EB that beats at the heart of this Viglen has 256K of full-speed cache built into the CPU. This is what the E after its name denotes. On all other PIIIs and PIIs, the cache is on a board next to the CPU, and runs at half the speed of the processor. Intel hopes that by making the cache run at the processor's speed, it'll be able to steal a march on AMD's all-conquering Athlon. Read on, fight fans.

The B in the name indicates that the memory will be run at a staggering 133MHz. To this end, Viglen's fitted 256Mb of PC133 RAM. The majority of PCs we examine tend to have 64Mb PC100 RAM if they're budget systems; 128Mb for middling to pricey PCs. By fitting 256Mb, Viglen is sending a clear signal that this is a PC to be taken seriously - no mere word processor.

Having this much memory helps the PC run faster in many ways. Fans of bulky office suites like Office 2000 will find their system slows down with each application that's open. Even if you're not actively using a program, only switching to it now and again, it still occupies valuable memory and system resources. Have an array of applications open at once, and your PC groans under the weight. And don't tell your boss, but plenty of RAM also helps games clatter along nicely.

Alongside the ocean of RAM is an expansive 20Gb hard disk. Made by Western Digital, it's an UltraDMA 66 model, which helps it achieve peak performance.

A Pioneer 114 DVD drive and a Sony CRX140E CD-R/W drive round off the system's storage. In testing, I was

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disappointed by the Pioneer, which refused to detect and play our standard DVD test sequence from the movie Armageddon. I tested the disc in another machine, and concluded that Viglen had unfortunately fitted a dud. These things happen. Other Pioneer 114 drives we've tested have given excellent DVD playback.

A Guillemot 3D Prophet handles the Viglen's graphics. Based on the nVidia GeForce chipset, it's a great card - especially for 3D games. In the 3DMark test it scored 6405 at a resolution of 800x600; 6329 in 1024x768.

Last month's Atlas is a better bet if you're a hardcore gamer, though. It scored 7194 at 800x600 and 7180 at 1024x768. Both systems have GeForce cards, so this difference in performance can be attributed directly to the processors. The Atlas had an 850MHz Athlon, the Viglen a 800MHz PIII. The AMD is clearly the faster.

Viglen's own-brand monitor is a compensation. It's a 19in display, offering excellent picture quality. An extra 2in over a (now standard) 17in screen may not sound impressive - but when you're working, it makes a difference. With more space on-screen, you can easily run two applications side by side.

Image controls are less impressive. With nine control buttons in all, I was left fiddling to center and size my working area. Simpler would have been better.

Microsoft makes both the keyboard and mouse for the system. The keyboard is Microsoft's new Internet model, with extra grey buttons to perform tasks like Internet searches and e-mailing, as well as flipping backwards and forwards through web pages. Its typing action is rather light, and the whole thing feels a bit plastic.

The mouse is an IntelliMouse Explorer, which has fancy optical electronics and a red light instead of a ball. In use, it's comfy and quite the flashiest mouse around.

Sound is handled by a Creative Sound Blaster 128, integrated onto the motherboard. For older games this is fine. Sadly, though, it only has one stereo channel, so can't take full advantage of the 3D sound built into many new games. The Altec Lansing ACS33 speaker set has two satellites and a subwoofer. They make a pleasing, clear sound with decent bass.

All in all, this is an excellent system, thanks to components like the Guillemot graphics and the 800MHz PIII. It's only when you stand it next to Atlas's Meridian A850 that you realise its two major shortcomings. First, it's £100 more expensive. Second, it's comparatively slow - the Athlon benchmarked at a phenomenal 2737. Atlas and AMD still rule the roost for tyre-blistering performance at a wallet-friendly price.