Product Reviews

If you've ever seen Wayne's World, you'll remember the scene in which the two main characters meet their hero, the rock star Alice Cooper. They're so overcome that they throw themselves to the floor, chanting "We're not worthy! We're not worthy!" Well, that's pretty much how we felt about this PC. For just £499 it's an incredible achievement.

Features

It's a shame the nForce's 5.1-surround sound wasn't used on this system. That said, a 40Gb hard drive, 256Mb of RAM, a DVD drive and 10/100 networking for this price is a winning combination. The networking in particular is a real plus if you live in one of the growing number of areas in which you can access broadband Internet from your cable TV provider. Once the engineers have been round to hook your house up to their network, all you'll need to do is plug your cable modem into your network controller and you're ready to go. A CD burner would have been nice, but would have added just too much to the price.

Ergonomics

As impressed as we were by the PC as a whole, we recoiled in horror from its weird and freakish mouse. Where the poor rodent's scroll-wheel should have been was a small block of what looked like rough carpet backing. The idea is, that when you want to scroll down you pull the carpet backing backwards, when you want to scroll up you push it forwards. Recovering from our initial mistrust we had to concede that it works fairly well. We've never heard of the Adiance Scorpion keyboard, but on the whole

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it's pretty good. The action is springy, not spongy, and the keys are nice and big with a decent profile, making them easy to type with. The Hansol 710A monitor isn't quite on a par with the Aries' CTX - power regulation is a little bit sloppy in comparison - but with sharp focus and solid convergence, it's not far off.

Expansion

With only two USB ports and two free PCI slots, there isn't much potential for adding new capabilities to this PC - a pity, because there are so many things it's capable of. On the up side, despite plumping for a Micro-ATX motherboard Multivision has gone for a decent-sized midi-tower, so you do get lots and lots of drive bays to play with. The small motherboard also means you're left with plenty of room inside the case to work in if you decide to fiddle with your PC's innards. Anyone who's ever tried to do some delicate work in a cramped case will know how important that is.

Performance

Yet again, we take our hats off to nVidia's nForce. The Twinbank memory technology that doubles the width of the memory bus from 64 bits to 128 bits really pushes gaming performance to the max. Fortunately, Multivision has been clever enough to use two strips of memory to actually enable this feature to work. It sounds basic, but it's surprising the number of manufacturers who don't remember to do this. Again, however, not all the glory goes to one component manufacturer. The 1.4GHz Athlon processor in this system is the fastest processor we've ever seen in a budget system. What's more, it's only a couple of months away from having been cutting-edge technology. The result is a £499 PC that performs almost as well as one that costs £699.

Overall

This PC is such amazing value for money that we actually took pains to double-check with Multivision that they could sell if for £499. They assured us they could. You just won't get a faster, more feature-laden and eye-friendly PC than this for £499 - and probably not for £599, either. This being the case, all we can say is: buy, buy, buy now before they change their minds!