Product Reviews

Budget home PCs may have a few extras to catch your eye, but they almost always have mediocre processors. True, Intel's Core 2 Duo range is now cheap enough to fall into this category, and dual core chips are not to be sneezed at. But they're hardly cutting edge.

No prizes for guessing that Zoostorm would break the mould. Always keen on packing more performance into a price, they've come up with a system that costs less than £500 but includes an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600. As the name hints, this gives you four processing cores in the space of one. Each core runs at a speedy 2.4GHz, unless you fancy overclocking it and ekeing out even more.

An impressive component like this was always going to result in a decent benchmark score, and our 2D result of 197% means the Q6600 is almost comically over-powered for everyday Windows tasks. You might have to run all your office applications at once, or get it to encode a couple of movies in the background, just to stop it getting bored.

Having blown their cash on this monster, Zoostorm haven't been able to buy much else with that £499 to fill the modest case. There's no graphics card, just a small corner of the motherboard devoted to Intel's GMA X3100 integrated graphics chipset, which could no more run our 3D benchmark than it could dress up as a chicken and run the London marathon. Not only does this rule out any kind of modern games, it also puts a question mark over the system's ability

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to cope with heavy video tasks such as handling HD footage.

The 19 inch monitor hasn't been chosen with movies in mind, either. A 22 inch widescreen would have been a nicer all-round choice, but - hang on a minute, for £500 you're lucky to be getting a monitor at all. And it's no bargain basement model: for work and general use we found it excellent, with rich colours, sharp edges, and only the merest hint of the backlight bleeding through to the desktop. The range of movement in the stand was limited, but that's a minor complaint.

Two tone

The case, though, feels budget. A flimsy door guards the DVD-RW drive and a selection of ports: three USB, FireWire, headphone and microphone jacks, and a well specified memory card reader. Below the fragile black plastic is silver brushed metal, into which the power button is cut; its design makes it particularly stiff and unforgiving. On the back of the case, four more USB ports offer plenty of connectivity, but there's no DVI-I digital monitor output - it's strictly analogue VGA.

The inside is similarly sparse. There's a PCI-Express slot that could be used for a graphics card, but the system's power supply is only capable of 285 watts, and doesn't have the 6-pin power connector that a modern card might need. A decent card, coupled with the fast processor, could have been a good future upgrade to produce a competent budget gaming rig, but having to replace the PSU too starts to look like hard work.

An Akasa fan covers the processor and keeps it very cool - certainly colder than the standard Intel heatsink would - and tremendously quiet, producing a whirr of air that would barely be audible in the most tranquil of rooms. This excellent fan also means overclocking is a real possibility, should you feel confident enough to go tinkering in the BIOS.

An all-round multimedia centre this isn't, but if you want a straightforward PC with excellent performance for office-type tasks, this quiet and quick machine offers remarkable value.