Product Reviews

On first meeting the Advent 3415, I wanted to like it. It's one of the new wave of PCs that have sworn against using the colour beige. This month, Polar has gone all moody and black. The Watford Aries is chic in its brushed silver metal. Advent has plumped for a metallic blue - and it works well.

For a tower case the Advent is also fairly petite, measuring just 350mm in height. This compares to the imposing Mesh's 460mm. The Advent is a compact and inoffensive system - one that would look at home in any family computer room.

But underneath this unassuming case is a 3GHz Pentium 4 - the most powerful chip currently produced by Intel. This PC, on paper, should be a teddy bear of a machine with the punch of Mike Tyson.

People who like to do ten things at once - watching a DVD in one window while they type up a report in another, say - will be particularly happy at the prospect of owning a PC with the latest Pentium 4. Intel's latest Pentiums include a technology called 'Hyper-Threading', which allows Windows to pretend the PC actually has two processors. This doesn't mean you can get double the work out of a Hyper-Threading processor, but it does make it more efficient at running extra programs alongside, say, a game.

Inside, the Advent is pretty minimalist. For starters, it's built on a small micro-ATX motherboard, which helps to keep down the overall size of the PC. As a result, though, upgrading this machine could be a challenge. Only one memory slot and one PCI slot are free.

I was impressed to see Advent had fitted 512MB of memory - a commendable addition, but one that's tarnished slightly by the fact that it's the comparatively slow DDR266 RAM, as opposed

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to the quicker DDR333.

Sadly, the slow RAM is just the beginning of a story that explains the Advent's lowly performance. The next part is the graphics card, which isn't among the best. It's a GeForce4 MX 440; way down in nVidia's range. As a rule, nVidia's faster cards are all called Ti or Titanium. Slower cards are given the suffix 'MX'. This is reflected in the system's score of just 7,096 in 3DMark 2001. This is very poor for a machine with a 3GHz processor, and demonstrates just how much the super-quick Pentium 4 is being hampered by the Advent's slow graphics card.

Those who reckon PCs ought to be seen and not heard will be impressed by Advent's clever use of a plastic shroud to guide warm air away from the processor and direct it to an exhaust fan at the back of the PC's case. This avoids the need for an extra fan on the power supply. Sadly, though, Advent shoots itself in the foot by fitting a noisy fan to the case.

The Advent's hard disk is a 120GB bruiser made by Maxtor. It spins at 7,200rpm, and uses a UDMA-133 connection to 'talk' to the motherboard. This is the fastest interface currently available.

I've already talked up the Advent's good looks. But three major flaws make it less than comfortable to use.

The first of these is the keyboard. It's among the worst I've encountered, with a spongy feel - and, thanks to a compact, space-saving design, has no room for full-sized cursor keys.

The monitor was equally unimpressive. It's of a type known as 'shadow mask', which are cheaper to build and quite different internally from the aperture-grille displays we expect to see with most systems at this price. Compared to an aperture-grille monitor, this screen lacks vibrancy and punch. Its screen is very curved, making it particularly prone to glare and reflections. Close examination also revealed misconvergence at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.

Finally, the speakers. These let out a puny sound that lacks definition. Gamers thinking about buying this machine will soon want to upgrade them.

This PC was a missed opportunity. A better graphics card would have helped performance no end, as would DDR333 memory instead of the DDR266 supplied. As for the monitor and keyboard: buyers have a right to expect better.