Novatech Enigma review

The Novatech is this month's cheapest system - and it shows. Four years ago, a 19in widescreen monitor may have been the height of luxury, but today it reeks of penny-pinching, especially with its relatively poor contrast ratio of 500:1.

And it's partnered with a Radeon HD 4850 graphics card - a great budget choice, but disappointing in a premium Core i7 PC. It achieved middling scores in our Call of Juarez test, and proved slower still in Crysis, coming in joint-second bottom of the table.

You might expect Intel's own X58 motherboard to make the perfect partner for a Core i7 processor, but it's the least versatile board here by a distance, with fewer PCI Express slots than most, no IDE controller, and only one Ethernet port. Worst of all, it has just four RAM slots of which three are already populated with 1GB DIMMs.

To round off this litany of let-downs the Enigma sports a 500GB Samsung SpinPoint drive, tying with CyberPower and Scan to offer the least storage this month. It adds up to an underwhelming system whose 2D benchmark score of 1.84 is the lowest here.

Novatech lists the Enigma as a gaming PC, and the Antec Ultimate Gamer case is set about with illuminated fans to express its hard-core credentials. That makes it this month's noisiest PC, emitting up to 48dBA from the front - and to no real purpose. These components simply don't need this sort of cooling, and we can't picture a serious gamer choosing a system with such a small screen and unremarkable graphics.

One thing you can say for the Enigma is that it's aptly named, as it's a mystery as to who would choose this system over the competition. That's not to say it isn't a capable PC, and its comparative weaknesses may be partly excused on account of its low price. But when you look at what an extra £130 can buy you, it's impossible to recommend.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith