Product Reviews

The Home Educata is the only Pentium 4-based PC in the month's group test, and its performance is all over the place.

Features

Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia is the only piece of software bundled with this system, but it is pretty cool - and genuinely educational. There's the standard core spec of 256Mb of RAM and a 40Gb hard drive. Don't be disappointed, though, as that's more than enough for pretty much any task. Finally, don't forget the Epson C20UX printer that's bundled with this PC - it's not the fastest printer around, but it's not bad either.

Ergonomics

The A4Tech Optical Greateye mouse has two scroll wheels, though we were never able to discover why. As with most other A4Tech mice that we've seen in our Labs, the scroll action on both wheels felt loose, slack and cheap. The Logitech keyboard was

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good - but, as with the Multivision, the action wasn't as firm as we'd have liked. The CTX VL700 isn't a bad monitor. Its power regulation leaves a little to be desired, but it's not catastrophic, and both focus and convergence are actually pretty good. Not bad for a budget range monitor.

Expansion

This PC comes with an incredible eight USB ports. But that's not all: four of those USB ports are of the ultra-fast USB 2 variety, so when USB 2 peripherals become commonplace, they'll be talking to this PC forty times faster than with normal USB. It also has three free PCI slots, an empty CD bay and a floppy bay just waiting to be filled.

Performance

The designers of the Pentium 4 concentrated almost entirely on improving 3D performance without much concern for 2D performance, and it shows. But don't be too worried: all PCs have been fast enough to cope with pretty much any 2D application for years now, and this one is no exception. More significantly, this machine performs comparatively poorly in 3DMark 2000, but in 3DMark 2001 it's up with the leaders. This is almost certainly because the GeForce2 cards used by Aries' rivals are optimised to run in 16-bit mode, the 3DMark 2000 default, but less well adapted to running in 3DMark 2001's 32-bit mode. The Aries' Radeon 7500, however, has no such worries.

Overall

This isn't a bad PC at all; it's just not as good as the best of the rest.