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PC Specialist Aurea i3-530 Pro review

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Verdict

Despite the low price there's an awful lot of power here, and a solid PC behind it

Review Date: 21 Jan 2010

Reviewed By: Mike Jennings

Price when reviewed: £382 (£449 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
4 stars out of 6

Value for Money
6 stars out of 6

Performance
4 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

Intel’s recent processor refresh may have started at the top with the super-fast Core i7 range, but it's the budget end of the scale that's arguably more exciting. The Core i3-530 is the cheapest of Intel’s 32nm parts, yet it offers a level of power beyond anything managed by the budget Core 2 Duos of the past.

PC Specialist’s Aurea i3-530 Pro is the first system we’ve seen to include one. The new chip is based on the Clarkdale core – which is also used in Intel’s low-end Core i5 chips – and fits into the new mainstream LGA 1156 socket.

It may be far cheaper than Core i7 parts, but the Core i3-530 still includes advanced features. Its two cores run at 2.93GHz and are visible as four thanks to the inclusion of Hyper-Threading. Interestingly, it also features an integrated GPU on a separate 45nm die that allows you to buy a motherboard without any integrated graphics of its own.

It proved itself to be an able performer, cantering to a score of 1.66 in our 2D application benchmarks. That the bottom-end part can score so highly really shows the power in Intel's new range. It’s more than fast enough to handle intensive applications and, crucially, it’s far quicker than other systems we've seen at this budget: the Advent Firefly FP9004 has a Pentium Dual-Core E5300 processor and scored just 1.11 in the same tests.

The on-chip graphics are fine for media decoding, handling both 720p and 1080p H.264 clips smoothly, but less impressive for gamers. The chip averaged just 21fps in our Low quality 1,024 x 768 Crysis benchmark, so you'll be lowering the settings to play most current titles.

The rest of the Aurea specification is relatively prudent. We’d like a little more than 2GB of RAM, but it keeps Windows 7 Home Premium ticking over nicely. The 500GB hard disk and DVD writer keep that trend going – once again, we'd like a little more but for this price it's not bad at all.

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Comments

User comments

These i3,5 and 7 processors seem to represent a real step up in performance and power efficiency. I notice that Dell has an Inspiron 15 i3 330m processor laptop, can't wait for a review on that. Would the onboard graphics be of any advantage to Photoshop elements 8.0?

By stokegabriel on 22 Jan 2010

Let's start a campaign for PC Pro to buy a sound meter, so they can list the sound level rather than "It's a bit loud."

By phantombudgie on 22 Jan 2010

Is the system capable of displaying full HD-video, such as from Youtube or iPlayer, with the built-in Intel graphics?

By piphil on 22 Jan 2010

"Buy PC Pro a sound-meter..."

... and an anechoic room. They should get some change from £10K-£20K.

Or use someone's?

By JohnGray7581 on 22 Jan 2010

I can do it.

Great idea by PhantomBudgie. This would really make a difference and then you would see others copying. I would be organise this if PCPro really wanted to.

By TheObvious on 24 Jan 2010

Dear JohnGray7581

PCs are used in real rooms, not anechoic chambers. If the sound echoes off the walls and makes the reading 5% higher it will not make a difference, all the PCs tested will be affected the same. I'm not going to sue them if I buy a PC and it's 29.5 decibels when measured under perfect conditions instead of 29, I just want to know if the Graphics card fan is going to rattle the windows or not.

By phantombudgie on 24 Jan 2010

Not Boxing Clever

Aurea have done well to bring this budget box to market, although it has still missed a few tricks along the way. It was good to see a reasonable on-board graphics chipset. If ALL boxes had noise reduction, or liquid cooling, the box could be made much smaller. The small incremental cost of the improvements would be offset by the savings on materials. The concept of the desktop box as a piece of furniture has passed.

By specious on 25 Jan 2010

Noise testing

We noise test all PCs in our group tests, where we're able to send them collectively to a specialist centre in Milton Keynes: it's not practical to noise test in central London due to the wide variety of background noises.

We're the only magazine in the UK that does this, but it's not practical to do it for every PC we review. One, it would cost too much: courier costs, plus the setup time involved at the testing centre, mean that it's only practical in groups. Second, PC manufacturers are generally unwilling to let us keep hold of the PCs for too long, so we can't keep them all and then send them up in one batch.

It's press week so I won't be able to respond too much to this thread, but if you have any more thoughts on this topic I'm happy to hear them.

Tim Danton
Editor, PC Pro

By TimDanton on 25 Jan 2010

Whilst I enjoy reading pcpro reviews, I dislike the fact the retailers take advantage of positive reviews by bumping up the prices. Cheapest I can find this for is £462. Whilst not a massive premium, it would be nice if reviewed itms could occassionally be purchased for the price shown on pcpro's review.

By jamesv1001 on 2 Feb 2010

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