Product Reviews

If being big and ugly is a sign of unflappable, over-engineered power, then PC Nextday's aesthetically-challenged lump, the 5-7401 Gaming PC, must be a Panzer on speed.

FUN AND GAMES

One look at the Gaming PC's specifications will reassure you that this is a system built for serious gaming enthusiasts.

Rather than use an expensive dual-core Athlon X2 processor, which has little benefit for gaming, PC Nextday has used AMD's screamingly quick single-core counterpart, the Athlon 64 4000+. Running at 2.4GHz and allied to 1GB of RAM, the chip is fast enough for boring old office tasks, and more than up to the job of powering through current and future game releases.

Other aspects of this PC's specification are similarly impressive. A pair of Maxtor 200GB hard disks are supplied in a 'striped' RAID configuration - working like, this two disks are faster than one. They will also appear in Windows as one single 400GB drive.

The motherboard is an ECS model and employs nVidia's SLI technology for pairing two graphics cards. PC Nextday has filled each of the two sockets with nearly-top-of-the-range nVidia GeForce 7800GT graphics cards. Each one houses a whopping 256MB of memory, so you can be sure this partnership is going to eat up 3D games for breakfast.

GAMING BEHEMOTH

On paper the PC Nextday looks an impressively

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powerful machine, and it sliced through our application benchmarks with an excellent score of 123.

Even when you're not playing the latest 3D games, you can be sure that the 5-7401 will make short work of challenging tasks like video editing and encoding. Despite its admittedly high specification we were gobsmacked by the result achieved in our demanding Doom 3 benchmark. A score of anything over 30 frames per second (fps) is playable, but the PC Nextday nearly quadrupled this with a mighty 116.5fps. Even cranking up the resolution to the monitor's maximum of 1,280x1,024 and enabling 8x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering left this system with a super smooth result of 65.4fps. There's not a game on the market that will tax this PC's 3D power, and there's power to spare for the future as games become prettier and ever more demanding of your computer's hardware.

ALL THE TRIMMINGS

A good gaming PC needs more than just powerful hardware to really enthral, and this is a computer that has all the bases covered. The 19in AOC monitor showed no signs of ghosting or blurring during fast moving games, gave a nice bright clear image and rendered the dark shadowy details of Doom 3 without a hint of trouble.

Sound is dealt with ably by a combination of the Creative Audigy 2 ZS sound card and a 7.1 surround sound set of Creative T7900 speakers. Thanks to the Audigy's extensive surround sound capabilities and the T7900s sheer power, both movies and games proved a positively thunderous experience. The speakers offer enough volume to fill even large rooms with sound, and creeping through dank corridors in Doom 3 was a nightmarish prospect.

BUYING DECISIONS

Although £1,500 might seem like a lot to pay for a computer: if you want mind-alteringly powerful games performance, then you have to pay for it. And the Zoostorm 5-7401 Gaming PC is a system that will show off the most demanding games at their very best.