PC Specialist Apollo Q9550 GTS review

The past few months' worth of desktop PC reviews may have been dominated by Intel's Core i7 chips and the next generation of Phenom processors from AMD, but PC Specialist's latest machine looks to prove that the previous generation can still cut it.

It may be more than a year old, but the Core 2 Quad Q9550 comes with a core clock speed of 2.83GHz, 12MB of L2 cache and a 1,333MHz FSB - plenty of power without the high price of a cutting-edge part. It doesn't have the numerous advantages of Intel's latest, such as HyperThreading, but the Q9550 is more than enough to return a good benchmark score of 1.72.

It certainly isn't as fast as recent Core i7 machines - the slowest, the Novatech Enigma, scored 1.84 - but it's more than enough to cope with demanding applications and intensive multitasking.

PC Specialist has chosen a brand-new GPU to partner the older processor, and it bucks the ATI trend that has emerged over recent months - this is the first PC we've seen with discrete Nvidia graphics since April's CyberPower Gamer Infinity 775 Silent Edition, which included a GeForce 9600 GT.

The GTS 250 in question follows the familiar Nvidia pattern of recent months - tweaking and re-branding old parts with new names - and is actually a revised GeForce 9800 GTX+ using a new PCB. It returned good scores in our benchmarks, too, with the 36fps score in our 1,600 x 1,200 high-quality Crysis benchmark slightly higher than the 33fps of the Chillblast Fusion Stinger, although it isn't as quick as the 54fps scored by the Yoyotech Water Dragon 3.6, which boasted an ATI Radeon HD 4890 card.

The Trident chassis isn't the best-looking we've seen, and it lacks room as well as style. The interior is dominated by a large plastic funnel that expels heat out of the side of the chassis and, while it folds out on its hinges to allow some basic upgrades, it will still need to be fully removed if you want to do any serious work inside the machine. Thankfully, though, PC Specialist has kept the interior tidy and well organised.

Upgrade potential is a little limited: there's only a single empty hard disk bay, one empty front-facing 3.5in slot and a pair of vacant 5.25in bays. The motherboard houses a trio of empty PCI slots, but no PCI Express 16x slots - so no chance of SLI, then - and only one PCI Express 1x slot. In its favour, there's a pair of empty DIMM sockets should you wish to add to the four gigabytes of installed memory.

The Apollo isn't particularly quiet, either, thanks to the stock Intel cooler and constantly churning Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard disk. It isn't the loudest system we've seen recently, with that honour going to the Mesh XGS PII 955R, but its high-pitched whirr could prove aggravating.

Ports-wise, the basics are well covered, with nine USB ports on offer alongside a pair of PS/2 sockets, Gigabit Ethernet and the requisite display and audio outputs, but there aren't any special additions such as FireWire or eSATA.

The Acer V243H monitor may look dull, but image quality is good - there's hardly any backlight bleeding, detail is sharp and colours are accurate, if lacking a little vibrancy. It isn't up to the standard of the best Samsung panels, but it's perfectly serviceable for movies and games - and its 1,920 x 1080 native resolution will endear it to Blu-ray fans, too, along with the Blu-ray reader included with the machine.