Product Reviews

We often talk about PCs being beige, which is a little unfair. Beige is that shade of light brown you might consider painting your walls; PCs normally start their life being closer to white, it's only after a few months of picking up office stains that they develop the yellow-brown tinge we now call beige. But Apple found a way round it - covering the white box in see-through plastic not only kept it whiter than white, but also made it look pretty snazzy. It's a strategy that Aries has followed very closely with the Perfecta 2800 Pro.

The Perfecta's milky white system unit certainly has a touch of class about it, and it's also well designed for easy access. You only have to undo a single thumbscrew and slide two catches to get the side panel off, and then it's all yours to play with. You don't even need a screwdriver - everything from the drives to the PCI slots are held in with quick-release plastic catches.

Aries has also done a good job of tying the cables out of the way, and it's easy to get at everything you need on the MSI 865PE Neo2-S motherboard, including two free DIMM sockets and four empty PCI slots. But the main selling point of the motherboard is Intel's new 865PE Springdale chipset.

This is an affordable alternative to the 875P Canterwood chipset, which doesn't include Intel's Performance Enhancement Technology or ECC memory support, but still offers an 800MHz FSB (front side bus) and the appropriate dual-channel PC3200 memory controller.

Aries takes advantage of this with two 512MB DIMMs rated at CAS 2.5 - an improvement over the high-latency CAS 3 memory we often see in PC3200 machines. This is partnered with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4C processor, which supports Hyper-Threading and has an 800MHz FSB (unlike its 533MHz-based predecessor).

The theory behind the Pentium 4C and Springdale is that you can now get cutting-edge performance and features at a lower cost, but unfortunately this is where the Perfecta 2800 Pro starts to show its weakness. The

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overall 2D benchmark score of 1.61 is roughly what you'd expect from the specifications (a 3GHz Pentium 4 with Springdale scores 1.67), but it's disappointing for the money next to Athlon-based machines.

At this price, you might also expect a better graphics card, as the Perfecta's Radeon 9700 Pro has now been usurped by the Radeon 9800 Pro and GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. One reason for this is that Aries is marketing the Perfecta as a 'business machine', but then you have to wonder why a business would want a Radeon 9700 Pro in the first place, especially when it could save money by going for a much cheaper generic graphics card.

The business angle also explains the lack of a decent speaker system, which seems sensible enough. Instead, you have to rely on the speakers inside the monitor's bezel, which sound weak and tinny, but they're adequate for Windows sounds.

Unfortunately, the rest of the monitor doesn't fare so well. A 17in TFT would usually be a good deal with a PC at this price - we normally expect a 19in CRT - but the supplied Orion 1770A is a disappointment. Vertical viewing angles are particularly poor, and despite being based on a Samsung Wiseview panel, it doesn't have the sharp image quality we expect.

The quality isn't helped by its reliance on an analog D-SUB input, especially when there's a DVI output waiting on the graphics card. The other annoyance is its appearance - the bezel is 28mm at its thinnest and it looks out of place next to the comparatively swish system case.

The same can be said for the A4 Tech wireless keyboard and mouse. They not only look cheap compared with Logitech and Microsoft's offerings, but the keyboard feels clunky in use, and the shape of the keys veers from a rhombus at the edges to a kind of triangle in the middle. It might be an attempt at improving ergonomics, but Microsoft's keyboards feel much more comfortable in use.

Aries has got PC building down to a tee, but the Perfecta 2800 Pro needs better features to be competitive. It's also debatable who this PC is for. Home users will want better speakers, while businesses won't care for fast 3D graphics. They'll also want more than a one-year, on-site warranty, and would be better off with a basic, cheaper and professional PC like the NEC PowerMate ML5 (see issue 102, p124).

Home users, meanwhile, should save their pennies for the £1,299 Dell Dimension 8300 (see issue 105, p56). It may cost £164 more, but it offers a superior 19in TFT, a decent speaker set, a DVD burner over the Aries' CD-RW, a 3GHz CPU and a faster graphics card.