Product Reviews

If you need to replace your clunky old desktop PC, but are loath to splash out too much cash, there is a solution; buy a PC base unit and re-use your monitor.

Compaq's SR1719UK is a budget PC base-unit, but at £430 it's not absolute bargain basement material. And when you consider that our PC group test this month looks at £599 budget PCs, which all include at least a 17in TFT monitor, the Presario is going to have to work hard to compete.

Eyes front

The Compaq isn't much of a looker, but we'd much rather have function over form and its plasticky fascia is laden with ports of various kinds. In fact, there's very little you can't plug in the front of the Compaq. There's a 6-in-1 card reader, three USB ports and a FireWire port too. That's not to mention the three audio jacks, which let you plug in headphones, a microphone and the line out from other devices without reaching around the back of the PC.

Compaq has obviously spared a thought for upgradeability too. There are three spare PCI slots and a PCI-Express 16x slot ready and waiting for a suitable graphics card. If you have a few PCI cards sitting in your old PC, such as a TV tuner, modem or sound card, you can

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easily transplant them into the Compaq. Unfortunately, the single PCI-Express 16x graphics slot isn't complemented by any slower speed PCI-Express 1x, 4x or 8x slots. At the moment, there aren't many other PCI-Express cards available, apart from a few dual-tuner TV cards, but in the future, the Compaq may limit your upgrade options.

The core specification of the Presario isn't anything remarkable given the price. There's an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ processor and 512MB of DDR memory. 512MB is an adequate amount of memory, but it does tend to cause machines to struggle with our benchmarks and the SR1719UK was no exception with a so-so 67%. The lack of memory is compounded by the fact that Compaq has used a single 512MB module, which limits the motherboard to operating in single channel mode. Two 256MB, or preferably two 512MB modules would have improved performance.

Where's the wow factor?

We certainly weren't wowed by the SR1719UK's onboard graphics either. The ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset is no powerhouse, but our Call of Duty 2 benchmark made it look ready to be put out to pasture with a lowly score of 4%. Even once we'd turned the resolution down to a blocky 640 x 480 and all the detail settings down to their absolute minimum, it was still unplayably slow.

Unfortunately, the rest of the Compaq's specification doesn't make up for its poor performance. The real clincher is that all the PCs in this month's £599 group test perform better than the Compaq and come with reasonable quality 17in TFT monitors too. That's not to mention the award-winning Dell, which provides a dual-core processor, double the amount of memory, a quality pair of speakers and an excellent TFT monitor for the price, which leaves the SR1719UK looking like shoddy value for money.