Product Reviews

Buying a great gaming PC is simple if you have thousands of pounds burning a hole in your pocket. But if your budget doesn't stretch to the fastest processor, the most ludicrously over-powered graphics card, oodles of memory and a huge monitor, then you have to make some careful decisions about where to spend your hard-earned cash. Well, why don't you let someone else do all the hard work for you? PC Nextday has built a top-notch gaming PC for just under £900.

MILD-MANNERED INTERIOR

The Zoostorm 5-5402's specification is fairly ordinary by today's standards. PC Nextday has employed the good, but unremarkable, Athlon 64 3200+ and slotted in two 256MB sticks of RAM. For a gaming system 512MB of RAM is a little on the frugal side - we'd have preferred to see at least a gigabyte of the stuff.

What's especially surprising in such a budget conscious machine is that PC Nextday has chosen to use two 160GB hard disks installed in a RAID configuration. RAID is built in to most motherboards and allows two hard disks to work as one - in this case the two 160GB hard disks appear as one 320GB drive. This enables data to be spread evenly across the two disks so that Windows can read it from both disks at the same time, thus allowing it to shunt data around far more quickly.

TOUCH ME

The Zoostorm 5-5402's gaming credentials are principally given away by the fancy keyboard and mouse. The Zboard keyboard allows you to swap the standard PC keyboard keyset with one designed expressly for playing games. While with the standard keyset installed, the Zboard looks pretty much like any other PC keyboard, the gaming keyset squeezes all the letter keys to the right to make space for big chunky buttons labelled with gaming commands like Pause, Reload

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or Use. You can also purchase more keysets that are specifically designed for games like Battlefield 2, Doom 3 and Call of Duty 2. The mouse is a 'laser' model produced by Genius and despite feeling a little plasticky, it's comfy to use and sensitive to the slightest flick of the wrist. The keyboard and mouse combination will put a smile on any self-respecting gamers face.

BE HAPPY

That smile is just about to get even wider too. PC Nextday has taken full advantage of the system's SLI motherboard and installed two graphics cards. The 5-5402 has two Inno3D GeForce 6800GS installed, each with a whopping 256MB of memory.

The Inno3D is a superb graphics card, and won a Best Buy award in this month's graphics card group test. Two of them in tandem make a formidable combination and they charged through our Doom 3 benchmark with a mighty score of 95.3 frames per second (fps). Even upping the resolution to 1280x1024 and enabling Doom 3's Ultra quality mode posed little problem and the system returned a score of 72.8fps.

To see how the PC Nextday could perform under real pressure we installed our giant-killing Call of Duty 2 benchmark. It gave an impressive score of 24.2 fps, which put it just behind systems with nVidia's high-end GeForce 7800GTX cards installed. However, Call of Duty 2, and to a lesser extent Doom 3, both suffered from the measly 512MB of RAM.

Actually playing the games saw the action pausing and jerking occasionally as data was needed from the hard disks. However, installing a gigabyte of RAM completely cured the problem and even increased the Doom 3 and Call of Duty 2 benchmark results - the latter showing the most significant benefits with the score rising from 24.2fps to 28.5fps.

BUYING DECISIONS

PC Nextday has made a valiant attempt at building a great gaming PC at a sensible price, but some curious component choices marr the experience. We'd get rid of one of the 160GB hard disks, exchange the Zboard keyboard for a basic model and perhaps even downgrade the decidedly average 17in AOC monitor to a decent 19in CRT model. For the budget conscious gamer, a CRT monitor is much better value than a bargain basement TFT. With another 512MB RAM and perhaps a slightly faster processor you'd have a bargain system that could really take advantage of the two Inno3D graphics cards.