Product Reviews

Dotlink's 266MHz PII Magnum (reviewed issue 41, p149) made it onto the PC Pro A List as our machine of choice in the sub-£1,000 category. The Magnum II-Gold is positioned as the next step up in terms of power and features for users prepared to spend a bit more - £300 more to be exact. Even so, the Gold remains a low-cost system, and like the 266MHz version it offers a remarkable amount for an extremely reasonable price.

The Gold differs from the Magnum II-266 by having a 300MHz processor, AGP rather than straight PCI bus graphics, a 17in monitor, a larger hard disk and an internal modem. You also get Microsoft Office 97 Professional instead of Lotus SmartSuite 97. Just reading back through this list gave me the impression that the extra £300 was being made to work hard.

There are other, relatively minor differences like a slight change in the case design. This is neither here nor there from an aesthetic point of view, but it does give the Gold the advantage of a marginally quieter cooling fan than its 266MHz counterpart. You also get a different mouse, with a Genius three-button Netmouse replacing the original Microsoft. This doesn't make much difference either, except for the fact that you get a scroll button to play with in addition to the standard pair.

Dotlink discovered long ago that Fujitsu makes one of the best keyboards on the market and has supplied them with most of its PC range ever since. The crisp, mechanical action and perfectly raked keypad will be a boon to anybody who has to type a lot, although the downside is that most other keyboards you'll subsequently use will feel decidedly inferior by comparison.

You get the same set of Juster active stereo speakers as you would with the Magnum II-266, but again this

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isn't a problem as the Justers deliver perfectly acceptable sound quality with enough bass, volume and overall clarity to make a decent job of business audio, music playback or sound effects.

The 17in Hansol FST monitor produces a 15.5in image diagonal, and has no difficulty supporting a resolution of 1,024 x 768 at a stable 85Hz vertical refresh. The controls are presented as a neat, easy-to-understand on-screen menu containing a good range of options including colour temperature selection and moirÚ reduction, as well as adjustments for the usual geometry corrections. The picture itself was fairly sharp, without any loss of focus at the corners. Considering the relatively low cost of the unit, you're undoubtedly getting good value for money. The only criticism I'd make, and it's not a serious one, is that the monitor could have been a little brighter at its maximum setting.

Internally, the Gold is both neatly constructed and fairly roomy, both of which will make life easier for anyone who needs to upgrade or replace part of the system. The ATX motherboard is fully accessible from above, so you can add more memory, change the processor module, or fit cards with no additional disassembly and so no blaspheming.

The 4Mb ATi 3D Rage Pro-based graphics card is made by Asus, and has S-video and composite video ports, allowing you to take video input from a VTR or camcorder, and if desired direct the display to a television set. It occupies the system's AGP slot, leaving four PCI slots free. The modem and SoundBlaster 16 cards take up two of the three ISA slots, but if you use the third you'll lose one of the PCI slots because of a shared backplate cut-out.

The machine is fitted with a 24-speed CD-ROM and a 4Gb Maxtor UltraDMA hard disk, but if you need to add further drives there's provision for doing so. There are two empty 5.25in bays below the CD-ROM drive, and a further 3.5in free bay lower down the stack, all of which open through the fascia.

Neither the price, the expansion potential, nor the bundled copy of Office 97 Professional would make me buy this machine if it was slow, but the Gold finishes off in some style. The overall benchmark results indicated a solid, if not spectacular, showing for a Pentium II/300, which really does make this PC one to check out if you're thinking of buying a new PC.