Product Reviews

When you're buying a PC for the whole family, things can get a bit tricky. While Dad needs a solid business system and something to print invoices on, Mum wants a scanner so that she can catalogue all the old family photos. And the kids? They want a beast of a gaming system and some booming speakers for playing their MP3s on.

At this point, we'd usually have to tell you that sadly, everyone can't have what they want. Not this time, though - the Zoostorm 6-6401 family computer really does have something for everyone.

AND THE KITCHEN SINK

There's just bags and bags of stuff with this PC. For starters, you get 1GB of RAM - more than enough to run almost any application without breaking into a sweat. The 250GB hard disk drive is big enough to store thousands of MP3s, digital photos and even video files. If you do feel like things are getting a bit cramped on your C drive, you can use the Zoostorm's DVD writer to shift some of your files to a DVD. The Samsung DVD burner in this PC can write to all the DVD formats around at the moment, except DVD-RAM.

As well as all these goodies inside the PC case, the Family PC also comes with an HP PSC 1410 printer/scanner/copier. This isn't the best multifunction device we've seen, but it's easy to set up and produces good-looking prints and accurate scans. Its only real downside is that print costs are relatively high, at 8.5p per page for the colour cartridge and 7.5p for the black cartridge.

We were a bit dubious about the webcam that comes with this system. We didn't recognise the brand, and most of the information on the box was in Chinese. Sadly, our first impressions weren't misleading. The camera only displays comfortably at a very low resolution and even then, the picture is pixelated and suffers from distortion due to over compression.

The two gamepads that come with the Zoostorm are good enough for arcade-style games, but they're both digital

POWERHOUSE

Thanks to the Zoostorm's Athlon 64 processor, 1GB of 400MHz memory and GeForce 6800GS graphics card, this system ran our Doom 3 gaming test at an impressive 62.8fps.

Performance in our speed benchmarks was just as impressive. It did well in all our tests, even the demanding photo-manipulation test. This system will cope easily with any software you care to throw at it.

LOOK AND FEEL

The Microsoft mouse and keyboard that come with this system are both wireless. This means that you can sit back and type away - no need to be tethered to the PC's base unit. Setup was simple, both mouse and keyboard communicated instantly with the receiver plugged into the PC. The keyboard is comfortable to use, and the action of the keys is clean and definite. The mouse fits comfortably in your hand and is accurate. It's also an optical mouse, so there are no moving parts to get clogged up.

The AOC monitor is neither desperately bad, nor particularly good. This PC is powerful enough to run games at much higher resolutions, even with all the detail settings turned up high. The monitor has a native resolution of 1280x1024 though, and so you won't be able to take advantage of these high resolutions, since the monitor can't display them. Image quality is reasonable - the screen is nice and bright, but contrast is only middling. Our test DVD didn't look as sharp and clean as it does on a really good monitor.

PLUGGING STUFF IN

The Zoostorm has two slots free for adding extra memory. There are also two free PCI Express slots, but sadly no standard PCI slots. There are no sound cards, TV cards or any other add-in cards currently available for PCI Express, which makes future expansion tricky.

The power supply is rated at 500W and supplies enough juice even for top-end graphics cards. If 250GB of storage isn't enough for you, then you could easily install a second hard drive in the free 3.5in drive bay and plug it into one of the four serial-ATA hard disk connectors on the motherboard.

BUYING DECISIONS

The Zoostorm PC is a powerful machine and comes with a good multifunction device and a cracking set of speakers that sound great. The other extras aren't as good though, and the monitor is middle of the road.