Advent PQG-9002 review

PC World-owned Advent has carved out a comfortable niche for itself by churning out a broad range of decent products at affordable prices, and the PQG-9002 aims for exactly that.

It's powered, for instance, by an energy-efficient iteration of AMD's popular Phenom X4 line, the 1.8GHz 9150e, which has four cores and a TDP of only 65W - less than half of some of AMD's high-end chips. Thus, power draw is low, with an idle 85W rising to only 121W when running our benchmarks - lower than most desktops systems manage at rest.

The concentration on energy efficiency understandably means performance suffers - although an overall score of 1.07 in our real-world application benchmarks is still around three times as fast as Atom-based budget systems - the Acer Aspire Revo 3600, for instance, managed just 0.29. It isn't up there with systems powered by full-fat CPUs - the Mesh Nero 9950 HD, for instance, featured an AMD Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition and romped through our benchmarks to return a score of 1.53 at a similar price.

But there's plenty of power for most everyday tasks, and the Advent offers basic gaming potential thanks to its ATI Radeon HD 4350 graphics card. While it isn't a high-end part, it managed 37fps in our low-quality Crysis benchmark, proving that it will be able to handle relatively recent games, even if quality settings need to be toned down. The HDMI port on the GPU's backplate is indicative of its ability to decode HD video - so you could look on it more as a media system than one for gamers.

Examine the Advent-branded chassis, though, and the PQG-9002's budget price begins to tell. The glossy frontage is disturbed only by a false brushed metal panel, which slides down to reveal a card reader and the front-mounted USB ports, and the flimsy side panel slides off to uncover a messy interior with little evidence of cable tidying.

There isn't much potential for upgrade and expansion, either. Three hard-disk bays are empty (you'll have to provide your own screws and tools, though) alongside a front-facing 3.5in bay and empty 5.25in bay. The meagre two DIMM sockets are already occupied by four gigabytes of DDR2 RAM and the motherboard offers only a single spare PCI socket and one empty PCI Express 1x slot - a further spare PCI socket is inaccessible, hidden behind the GPU's double-height passive cooler.

While the lack of upgrade room and untidiness grate, neither of these compare to the Advent's main problem - the wheezing 92mm CPU heatsink fan attached to the low-power AMD processor. It's one of the loudest we've ever heard in a PC and would prove incredibly distracting anywhere but a warehouse or server room - in short, it isn't exactly a good partner for an atmospheric movie session. We'd even go as far as to say the level of noise approaches that of the CyberPower Liquid Gamer Black Pearl; to put it in perspective, that was the loudest entrant in our recent Ultimate PC group test.

The Advent's roar is particularly galling since the inclusion of the Cooler Master CM12V fan appears to be nothing more than a cost-cutting measure. Add another five pounds onto the budget for a more competent cooler and, as well as the price still appealing, the finished machine will be pleasant to use.

As it is, though, the decent budget specification is let down by that noise level, and that makes it difficult to recommend for the low-power, media situations it best suits. The Mesh, on the other hand, is cheaper, more powerful, comes with a 22in Iiyama monitor and doesn't sound like a leafblower - which adds up to a far better budget deal.

Author: Mike Jennings