PC Nextday Zoostorm 2-3305 Versatile PC

As nice as it is to drool over the costliest hardware, the budget end of the market currently has masses to offer too. With a powerful dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM and an Nvidia 7600 GS graphics card, the Zoostorm 2-3305 promises more than we'd normally expect from a budget PC.

Although once at the forefront of performance, the Pentium D 820 at the heart of the Zoostorm 2-3305 doesn't make too many appearances in PC Pro these days. The core clock speed of 2.8GHz sounds impressive, but its TDP (thermal design power) of 130W is less so; sensibly, PC Nextday fits a GlacialTech heatsink and fan on the CPU to keep everything running quietly, rather than the noisy stock cooler. The Pentium D isn't fast by modern standards, but with a welcome 1GB of RAM, it achieved an overall benchmark score of 0.79. This is ample for Vista, which raced along in everyday tasks.

The hard disk is a surprisingly spacious 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE, with a spin speed of 7,200rpm and an 8MB buffer. That's more than enough capacity to store a well-proportioned photo collection, as well as a raft of games and applications, or a healthy smattering of video files.

It would be unfair to expect much gaming potential from a budget PC, but the Nvidia 7600 GS graphics are again a pleasant surprise. Using the current Vista drivers and at the monitor's native resolution of 1,280 x 1,024, we saw 13fps in Far Cry and 20fps in Call of Duty 2. Turn down the settings, and there's plenty of scope - performance should improve with newer drivers too.

The monitor is a rather pedestrian-looking 17in AOC LM765. Fortunately, the blandness stops at the features stage - in spite of the cheap appearance, the TFT's image quality is more than acceptable. The D-SUB-only connector isn't technically ideal, but with the monitor set up correctly (see www.pcpro.co.uk/links/151_setup), the worst we noticed was a little pixel-jitter in our demanding DisplayMate moire tests. A set of RGB colour ramps showed a little banding, but nothing to make us think colour accuracy would be unduly impinged. Our contrast tests showed a good level of detail in both light and dark areas.

The peripherals are all supplied by Genius and, despite being clearly budget options, there are no significant failings. The keyboard rattles more than some, and the mouse may prove too light for serious gamers, but both are fine for everyday use. The speakers are less praiseworthy: their most useful attribute proved to be the front-mounted 3.5mm headphone jack, rather than the weedy sound quality.

The chassis is inexpensive, as you'd expect at this price, but removing the side reveals good attention to detail, with power and data cables carefully routed to avoid clutter. The motherboard from ECS has a rather sparse set of features - just one spare SATA port and, worse, no free DIMM sockets: both sockets already house memory modules.

There are a few valuable additions elsewhere, though. The optical drive is an 18x DVD writer, which will also write to dual-layer discs at 8x and DVD-RAM discs at 5x. There's also a Ralink Turbo Wireless LAN card installed in one of the two PCI slots. A media card reader occupies the only external 3.5in drive bay, with another internal bay free for adding an extra hard disk.

There are some clear reasons not to buy the Zoostorm. The monitor, keyboard and mouse are very basic and the overall system lacks wow factor. But there's also plenty to like, and performance is more than enough for virtually any job - we wouldn't shy away from intensive image editing, for example. Throw in some capable gaming performance and this PC is little short of stunning value for money.

Author: Dave Stevenson