Product Reviews

When the PC Pro Labs team looked at the top ten corporate PC manufacturers in the UK in issue 58, there was no place for Siemens in the line-up. This is surprising as the German company claims to be the leading supplier of IT in Europe. It's hoping to crack the UK market with an extensive new range of PCs, and the Scenic 600 series - of which the Scenic 661 is just one example - is one of its most important weapons in this quest.

Opening the 661's case is easy: just slide the latch to the open position. Sitting inside is Siemens' own Slot 1 motherboard, which uses Intel's 440BX chipset. The board has three notable features: it has an integrated 10/100Mbits/sec NIC, it only uses a single fan for cooling - making the 661 exceptionally quiet - and it's capable of saving to RAM as well as to the hard disk if your configuration supports InstantOn.

The Scenic 661 is based on a Pentium III/500 with 128Mb of SDRAM and, in this case, the 8Mb Matrox Millennium G200. The G200 may not be able to match the latest graphics cards for 3D, but it remains an excellent 2D card. It can also be upgraded in the future, unlike the incorporated graphics chipsets supplied with many corporate PCs.

For local storage, Siemens supplies a Fujitsu 12.9Gb MPD3130AT EIDE hard disk. Should you ever need to change this, the screwless hard disk assembly enables you to swap over disks in less than a minute, including attaching the cable and power supply. This is all part of Siemens' attempt to produce an easy-to-maintain PC, so we were surprised to find the cables arranged untidily. To access the DIMM sockets you have to push aside a bundle of wires, and this makes finding power plugs and the correct cables unduly difficult.

You also have to steer clear of the wire connecting the Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! Value PCI card to the DVD-ROM drive, which should have been tucked neatly away. Perhaps even more questionable is why Siemens is including such a good sound card in a

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corporate PC, especially one that has no speakers - all you get is headphones and a microphone.

Adding PCI and ISA cards is much more straightforward. There are no wires in the way, and plastic catches are used to fix the cards and backplates in place. There's plenty of space for expansion, with four PCI and two ISA slots free, although one backplate is shared as usual. If you want to fit more drives, you are limited to one full-size internal bay and the external bay underneath the DVD drive.

Siemens' inclusion of a DVD-ROM is surprising in a corporate PC, with few business software titles yet making use of this media. This should change in the next couple of years, so you may eventually be grateful for a fleet of DVD-equipped machines.

The first thing most people will notice about this machine is the transparent green fascia. Like it or loathe it, the fascia's key feature is that it's lockable, thus preventing general access to the DVD or floppy drive. Things get even more security-conscious on the far right-hand side of the machine, where Siemens has fitted a chipcard reader. This prevents unauthorised access, as only users with appropriately encrypted smart cards can use the machine. For remote and local network management, Siemens supplies DeskView, based upon DMI 2. The Scenic 661 also supports Wake-on LAN and offers basic BIOS security features.

The 15in Siemens Nixdorf monitor is uninspiring, with a 13.9in viewable diagonal and a few problems besides. Foremost is poor focus in several areas of the screen - we'd expect this in the corners, but not on all four edges. It also showed some severe power regulation problems. If you switch between apps the screen sags noticeably. The only factor in its favour is that it supports a 90Hz refresh rate in 800 x 600 resolution, but we expected a 17in monitor with a PC at this price.

Siemens offers a comprehensive list of support features. Pre-sales consultancy is available, and bespoke disk imaging is available. As standard, all the Scenic 600 range has a one-year, on-site warranty, followed by two years of return-to-base cover. The cost of same-day service depends on factors such as how close you are to a branch of Siemens Information Technology Services. This level of support is certainly reassuring to a corporate buyer.

This machine seems like an eclectic collection of components: DVD-ROM, a fast processor, plenty of RAM, a smart card and a below-par monitor. It's hard to recommend it as it stands but, with some changes, the Scenic 661 could have real potential.