Medion MT 487 G

As Medion's recent victory in PC Pro's 2007 Reliability & Service Awards (web ID: 143826) testifies, cutting prices doesn't need to be at the expense of customer service and build quality. And while this Tesco exclusive might not make a radical aesthetic departure from previous budget Medion PCs, its petite frame hides a pleasant surprise in the form of an Intel Core 2 Quad processor.

Cast a critical eye over the Medion's tower case and, even considering the low price, it has a certain appeal: the black side panels contrast well with the silver plastic fascia. However, a quick tap leaves you in no doubt this is a bargain-basement construction. It isn't short on features, though. A button in the centre of the front panel opens up a sliding-action door to reveal a card reader, USB, FireWire and mini-FireWire ports, as well as composite video and audio connections. It's a nice touch, but, again, the construction feels cheap.

Disregard the Medion's lack of external luxuries, though, and there's plenty else to appreciate. The quad-core processor is a welcome sight in any sub-£1,000 PC and, while the 2.6GHz Q6600 might not boast Intel's latest 45nm fabrication technology (as found in Evesham's Teraxstor on p40), its four cores bring tremendous flexibility. Cushioned by a decent 2GB of RAM, it managed a respectable application benchmark score of 1.38.

Budgetary constraints are more evident elsewhere, particularly the MSI Q35 motherboard. It's a custom version of a basic microATX model, so there's no support for SLI, CrossFire or DDR3 memory. The choice of graphics card is similarly modest, thanks to the processor swallowing up a large portion of the budget. Nvidia's GeForce 8600 GT graphics card is a solid choice, though, with both DVI and HDMI outputs. It might only be a mid-range card, but it still earned 31fps in Call of Duty 2 at 1,280 x 1,024 with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering enabled. It will struggle with the likes of Crysis at demanding settings, but stick to modest resolution and detail levels, and it will acquit itself admirably: it managed 31fps at 1,024 x 768.

Peer inside the Medion's small case and there isn't much room for manoeuvre. One of the two PCI slots is filled by a hybrid TV tuner, which will record a single analogue or Freeview channel at a time, and the other is left free. There's also a PCI Express 1x slot, but it's blocked by the graphics card. While the microATX motherboard provides reasonable avenues for expansion, the tiny case leaves little room to take advantage. There are three free SATA ports, for example, but nowhere to put extra hard disks.

That said, with two eSATA ports and six USB ports at the rear, there's plenty of scope for adding external drives - and storage is distinctly generous for a budget PC anyway. Our only concern is the two 500GB drives being pre-configured in a RAID0 array. While the performance benefits are indisputable, if one drive fails, all the data on both is gone for good. We're also surprised at the complete lack of any case fans.

Given the small case, modest PSU and absence of fans, we'd hesitate to add a high-end graphics card, so if it's a low-cost gaming PC you're after you'd be better spending £400 more on PC Specialist's Apollo Q660GTS (web ID: 137322), which has the same processor, 4GB of RAM, an Nvidia 8800 GTS graphics card, a huge 22in monitor, and a more upgradable future.