Product Reviews

Up until now, the budget buyer has had a choice between a slow machine offering great features or meaner, leaner PCs with fewer frills but better performance. That left a gaping hole in the market for any manufacturer that could build a system offering a combination of both - and that's just what the E1000D does. When this PC arrived in the labs we had to do a double take. Perhaps we'd been sent the wrong computer. But no, this really is what you can get for just £499. We don't know how they did it, or who cut their own throat to bring you this unbelievable bargain, but we take our hats off to Easy PC Direct.

Features

Yes, that's right. A CD burner and a DVD drive for £499. We couldn't credit it either, but it's true. Not one of the other manufacturers in this test managed to include even a combined DVD and CD burner, but Easy PC goes even further than that and sticks in two drives for maximum speed and convenience. Then it threw in 256Mb of RAM and a 40Gb hard drive as well. Taking into account the fact that you also get Lotus SmartSuite for all your paperwork, and it's easy to see why the E1000D gets full marks for features.

Ergonomics

Ergonomics is the one area in which the E1000D lets itself down, though by no means badly. The keyboard is plain, with no shortcut buttons, but its action is good so typing for long periods of time won't be uncomfortable. It's a shame that the mouse isn't a wheel mouse, which might have earned an extra point, but you can't have everything. Where it really counts, however, Easy PC shows it knows how to spend its money wisely. The Relisys monitor is a little treat; the focus is sharp, the colours true, and there were no problems with power regulation or misconvergence. For a monitor in a budget Lab test with this tight a price, that's nothing short of amazing.

Expansion

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E1000D immediately earns brownie points for having four USB ports, great if you want to tinker around with webcams, scanners, joysticks and, well, pretty much any other device you can imagine - there isn't much you can't get in USB form these days. The downside to this is there are only three PCI slots free. For most people, though, this is unlikely to be a problem. Unless you're the type to have grand plans for home networking, or multiple upgrades to a number of SCSI devices, a new sound card and a TV card; three PCI slots should be plenty.

With free 5.25in and 3.5in bays, you'll also have room for a Live! Drive and Zip drive if you want, and with two free DIMM slots there's plenty of room for extra RAM. We were also impressed by how tidy the inside of the case was. Often with budget PCs everything gets crammed into a very cheap case, leaving wires and cables bulging all over the place, and with a power supply usually obscuring parts of the motherboard, making any upgrade a nightmare to carry out. That certainly wasn't the case here. Everything was squared away neatly, all the core components were easy to get to and there was lots of room to work in. If you've got a few projects in mind for a later date, the Easy PC will cope with a minimum of fuss.

Performance

A 1GHz Duron, 256Mb SDRAM, and a GeForce2 MX-based graphics card are a powerful combination for a budget PC. The E1000D isn't quite as fast as the Discovery 1000, due to its significantly slower 5,400rpm hard drive. But despite this, it still manages to beat the Compute-IT system in 2D, and come out with a respectable score in the 3D tests.

Overall

The E1000D gets an enthusiastic thumbs up from us. It's well designed, well put-together and packs in more features than we ever expected to get for this price. The hard drive is huge at 40Gb, and whilst it only spins at 5,400rpm, this doesn't drag the system speed down much. In fact, thanks to the quality of the Asus motherboard, along with the generous 256Mb of RAM and Hercules graphics card, the E1000D's performance isn't just respectable; it's fantastic! The real bonus, though - and what ultimately clinched it for this PC - was the inclusion of a CD-R/W drive and a DVD drive. This lets you watch movies on your PC as well as burn CDs and copy direct from disc to disc - something that, until very recently, only machines costing somewhere upwards of the £1,000 mark could do.