PC Specialist Vortex i920 review

Like Mesh, PC Specialist sets its Core i7 package apart from the crowd by bundling a 24in monitor rather than one of the more common 22in models. It's a unit that shines in this month's TFT Labs - the Edge10 W243H - and it's this month's most striking panel, with an unparalleled brightness of 500cd/m2. Its response time is slower than its rivals' at 8ms, but our gaming tests didn't suffer from ghosting.

They did, however, suffer from undistinguished frame rates. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 isn't a poor performer - it averaged 34fps in Crysis with high detail at 1,600 x 1,200 - but other systems offer more powerful cards. A more heavyweight GPU would have been particularly welcome with such a large screen. There's also no Blu-ray drive.

As PC Specialist supplies the i7-920 at its standard 2.66GHz clock speed, 2D benchmark scores were not surprisingly at the low end of the group, at 1.88 - although, as the system is built on the Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard, there's nothing to stop you turning up the clock yourself, just as Eclipse and others have done.

That familiar motherboard also means the Vortex's connectivity options are typical, although PC Specialist adds a multiformat card reader and a rear bracket with extra USB and FireWire ports. That adds up to an unrivalled 13 USB ports, of which three face forwards.

Finally, we're pleased to see a full terabyte of storage, in the shape of our A-Listed Samsung SpinPoint F DT hard disk, in addition to the standard 3GB of RAM.

In all, the Vortex i920 is a well-featured package, and if you're looking for a spacious screen its only rival is the Mesh i7 920 GTX+. But while the Mesh has a smaller hard disk, its superior 3D performance and high-definition Blu-ray optical drive make this system feel like a slightly lesser alternative.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith