Product Reviews

You don't expect subtlety from a PC system that answers to the name of Wolf. And the Cube247 is every bit as chunky as its Gladiators namesake. The tackily glamorous combat show is a fitting comparison: if we could choose one word to sum up the ST11, that word would be 'excess'.

That even extends to the HANNspree 19 inch widescreen monitor, with its butch rows of metal bolts. We reviewed this last month (issue 199, page 44), and found that, despite looking like it should have Pamela Anderson draped over it in a leather catsuit, it's really rather good. Colours are bright and saturated, images pixel-sharp - partly thanks to the superior digital DVI connection that links it to the PC - and if you need to adjust the settings, the on-screen display is wonderfully simple.

The monitor has basic stereo speakers built in, but you won't be needing them, as Cube247 has also thrown in a set of Creative Inspire T6100s. This hulking 5.1 setup provides plenty of oomph for games, although the bass is a bit fuzzy and the satellite speakers could have more sparkle.

It's not just the Wolf's styling that's over the top. In addition to some very handy connections that we don't always see in mid-priced PCs, such as FireWire (for MiniDV camcorders and fast external hard disks) and external SATA (for even faster external hard disks), the Cube247 provides no less than 12 USB 2.0 ports. Not even we have that many things to plug in. On peering inside, we discovered that the PCI card that supplies four of the rear ports also provides an extra internal port. Just in case you were worried

The Cube 247's Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 processor is becoming a familiar choice in mid-priced PCs. It's not the fastest, with a modest clock speed of 2.33GHz, but we reckon it offers the best combination of power and price at the moment. The 500GB Seagate hard disk is big, but drives of this size are fast becoming commonplace. What we weren't expecting was a whopping 4GB of RAM.

A gig too far

As we've pointed out before, it's great in principle having four gigs of RAM - you can run more programs at once, edit 12 megapixel photos and so on without things slowing down - but the standard 32-bit versions of Windows Vista will ignore about a gigabyte of it. This explains Cube247's unorthodox choice of installing 64-bit Windows Home Premium. The problem is, many peripherals don't have 64-bit drivers available, so most of the stuff you like to plug into your PC may just stop working. Wisely, Cube247 offers the choice of 64-bit or 32-bit when you buy, and we'd go for the latter, sacrificing some RAM for less hassle.

Accordingly, we ran 32-bit versions of our benchmarks, and despite being thus deprived of some of its massive memory, the Cube247 notched up an impressive 192% in our general 2D tests.

The Wolf's Asus motherboard is an SLI model that enables you to install two nVidia graphics cards in parallel, doubling your graphics processing power. Only one of these is filled as standard, with a GeForce 8600GT - an affordable but powerful card that helped the Cube247 to a decent 29.8 frames per second in our Call Of Duty 2 gaming test, a 3D score of 101%. So this isn't a screaming games machine, but should cope quite happily with next year's games, with room to upgrade.

There's nothing much wrong with the ST11 at all, but unless you fancy wrestling with 64-bit Vista, the 4GB of RAM is somewhat wasted. That means some of the asking price doesn't translate into performance. The Zoostorm 4-2353, reviewed on page 36, offers a perfectly adequate spec for £200 less, albeit with a few more corners cut. Still, for £699 the Wolf is a PC with very decent core components and a few nice extras.