Dotlink Magnum Entro

With Christmas around the corner, bargains and ideal gifts are promised from every quarter, with retailers vying to take maximum advantage of our annual buying binge. A Scrooge-like shopper might assume that none of those bargains are really what they seem, but this year we seem to have found an exception. Dotlink's Magnum Entro is an unashamed assault on the first-time Christmas PC buyer, its major weapon being one of the lowest retail prices we've ever seen.

Even more surprising is what lies under the bonnet of this ultra-cheap PC: an IBM-made Cyrix 6x86MX/166 processor, and no less than 32Mb of EDO RAM. You would expect corners to have been cut and perhaps substandard components, but Dotlink has made some sensible decisions as to which cuts to make. The 1.6Gb hard disk, for example, isn't the largest on the market, but it hails from Maxtor, a well-known manufacturer who won a Speed award in the last hard disk Labs (issue 30, p116).

Other crucial components frequently targeted in cost-shaving exercises are the monitor, keyboard and mouse. The peripherals supplied with the Magnum Entro aren't Rolls-Royce-like quality, but they're better than the low-end norm. The 14in monitor from Hansol may be curved like the visor on a spacesuit, but a decent anti-reflective coating and a sharp, stable picture ameliorate matters. At 800 « 600 resolution this is a perfectly usable monitor. It doesn't have a huge range of adjustments or an on-screen menu, but the controls are clearly laid out along the bottom of the screen and don't demand a degree in electronic engineering to use them.

Acer and Genius provide the keyboard and mouse ensemble. As OEM keyboards go, the Acer is better than most; the keys have a solid feel and a pleasingly positive medium-weight action. The mouse can't match the Logitech or Microsoft units, but it's usable, and left-handers will be pleased to know that it doesn't favour right-handed users.

Audio suffers the biggest cuts, however, consisting of a 16-bit ESS Audiodrive sound card and a pair of underpowered speakers, resulting in a rather impoverished combination. Despite the claim of 80W power output, these speakers produce a pathetic sound. Bass is lacking to the point of non-existence and the dynamic range is laughably limited. You really don't want to be playing anything but the most trivial of incidental sounds with this setup. However, Dotlink does give you a degree of flexibility when buying the PC: if you wish, you can have the Magnum Entro without any sound and a faster 200MX processor so that you can use it as a straight office desktop.

Opening the case revealed a well-built interior. All the free expansion slots are easy to get at and the cabling is neatly tied away. The only problem is that the SIMM slots are located just next to the power cabling and the IDE sockets, so it's a little tricky getting at the free slots - if Dotlink had moved them over before shipping, your RAM upgrade would be considerably easier. You get two 3.5in drive bays for adding hard disks, and two 5.25 spaces in addition to the slot occupied by the Mitsumi 24-speed CD-ROM drive. It's not the most expandable of PC cases, but it's more than adequate for its target market.

The entire system is built on a motherboard from another respected manufacturer, Asus, but features the more obscure SuperTX chipset from SiS. After taking into account the sound and graphics card, you get one ISA, two PCI and a shared PCI/ISA slot free, which should be enough for most people. There's the standard quota of 512Kb of pipeline-burst cache, but because the board isn't ATX the CPU and fan arrangement prevent the installation of full-length expansion cards in all but one of the PCI slots.