Product Reviews

With a clock speed of 850MHz, AMD's new Athlon processor is once again the fastest chip around, and the Panrix Magnum 850 is one of two PCs we've received this month that incorporate it. Both machines have a remarkably similar specification, boasting an Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 monitor, a 32Mb DDR GeForce graphics card, as well as identical modems, speakers and sound cards.

Unlike the Evesham Athlon 850 DDR (reviewed opposite), Panrix has opted for the established standard of 128Mb of SDRAM. This is enough memory for most requirements. The only area where it affected the Magnum was in the Photoshop test, and unless you frequently manipulate large images you'll be hard pushed to notice a difference between the two machines.

Graphics are taken care of by Guillemot's new Hercules 3D Prophet, offering 32Mb of DDR memory, TV and LCD outputs and nVIDIA's acclaimed GeForce 256 chipset. In Panrix's setup, the card provided impressive results, consistently outperforming the Evesham in both Direct3D and OpenGL applications. Even when running at 1,600 « 1,200 resolution in 16-bit colour the Panrix was lightning quick, with a final score of 2,580 against Evesham's 2,450. Similarly, in the Quake III tests at the same resolution the Panrix sustained an impressive 35.3fps (frames per second), while the Evesham managed 33.4fps. Panrix plans to boost the machine's performance even further on its release, by incorporating VIA's new KX133 chipset on the north bridge and so adding AGP 4x support.

A ten-speed AOpen DVD-ROM drive is provided, and combined with the Xing software DVD player it produced slightly better movie playback than the Evesham. However, the picture was still quite grainy with occasional ghosting, but this is to be expected unless you have full hardware DVD support.

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The Creative Labs FPS1000 speakers provide good bass response and clear sound, emanating from the more than adequate SoundBlaster Live! 1024 Player card.

Just like the Maxtor disk in Evesham's machine, Panrix's choice of IBM's 27.3Gb Deskstar formats down to 25.4Gb under Windows 98, which should be sufficient for most needs. The machine only includes Windows 98 SE and DVD software pre-loaded, but Panrix also bundles Scarlet's Ultra Pack Volume 3. This includes Lotus SmartSuite Millennium 9, providing a good all-round office package, as well as MGI PhotoSuite and a few other multimedia titles.

For removable storage, Panrix has supplied an internal Zip 250 drive, giving a 250Mb storage solution that's quick and backwardly-compatible with 100Mb disks. The Zip drive is perfectly adequate for its purpose, but there are advantages to the CD-RW that Evesham supplies, such as higher capacity, cheaper media and a much wider installed base.

For upgrade purposes there's one 3.5in internal drive bay for an extra hard drive, and two 5.25in external drive bays, giving you space for a CD-RW should you so desire. The 128Mb is provided on a single DIMM, leaving you two free sockets along with three spare PCI slots, one of which is shared with an ISA slot. This should be enough for most of the upgrades you might want, although again the Evesham has the slight upper hand, offering an extra PCI slot.

Like the Evesham, the Magnum 850 offers all the features you'd expect, including a Diamond SupraExpress 56i V.90 modem for fast Internet access, as well as a superb Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 monitor which will give you a sharp, stable and well-focused picture on its Natural Flat Diamondtron tube. It runs optimally at 1,152 « 864 resolution at 120Hz with a stable flicker-free display and sharp focus.

Panrix is also offering a three-year warranty with the Magnum 850, with one year on-site and two years return-to-base. This is one year longer than Evesham's two-year on-site warranty, but most will prefer having the extra year's on-site cover.

The Magnum 850 is incredibly quick and you won't be disappointed by its performance. While it outperforms the Evesham in 3D applications, it only has half as much memory, lower-capacity removable storage and a higher price tag. The Panrix Magnum 850 is fast, but the Evesham offers better value for money.