Zoostorm 3365-7514 Core 2 Quad review

The alphabetical ordering of this Labs conveniently leaves us something special to finish with, courtesy of Zoostorm. Simply put, this is the fastest Vista PC ever to grace the pages of PC Pro, and that's despite it being the only one here with just 2GB of RAM.

It's all thanks to the brand-new 45nm QX9650 processor and some aggressive overclocking: the standard 3GHz clock has been pushed to more than 3.6GHz, with the brand-new DDR3 RAM running at an incredible 1,600MHz.

And although this sample has an Asus P5E3 motherboard, Zoostorm will be fitting a Maximus Extreme with the same X38 chipset by the time you read this, and is confident it will offer even more in the way of overclocking potential.

But even as it stands, what a performance it gives. Our 2D benchmarks were left battered and bruised by its blistering score of 2.07, making the Zoostorm very much the ultimate in that respect. The single GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card will walk all over most of the latest games with ease, and the lack of a second at least helps to keep the price manageable.

Zoostorm was keen to point out to us that it intends to sell just the base unit, without a monitor (£2,100, part code: 3375-7514), which is a good job, since the supplied 22in AOC is VGA-only and generally unremarkable in quality. There are also no bundled speakers, although you do get a decent 900GB of storage and Vista Ultimate.

But apart from that incredible speed, there just isn't enough elsewhere to justify the cost. For an almost identical price, the quirky Chillblast offers slightly reduced performance, but more than compensates with a top-quality 24in screen, 7.1 speakers and a Blu-ray drive, making it a far more attractive all-round deal.

Author: David Bayon