Product Reviews

Windows Vista is packed with useful features, but the retail version of Home Premium Edition costs around £200. You might expect that a dual-core PC with Vista Home Premium would be expensive, but PC Nextday's Zoostorm 2-3305 Versatile PC shows that this doesn't have to be the case. It comes with Vista Home Premium and an Intel Pentium D processor for under £520.

The Pentium D 820 processor isn't as fast as the latest Core 2 Duo chips, but it still has two cores, and is quick enough for most computing needs. Combined with 1GB of RAM, it attained a very respectable score of 164 in our video-encoding benchmark and 132 in our image-editing test. Strangely, it was about 15 points slower than other similarly specified PCs in both our video-encoding and multitasking tests.

We tested to rule out a hardware problem and re-ran our benchmarks under Windows XP with similar results, suggesting that the basic MicroATX motherboard might be a little slow. It's able to accommodate a faster Core 2 Duo processor, but has two RAM slots that are already filled so you'll have to get rid of one or both of the RAM chips to add more memory.

The Zoostorm has a decent graphics card that is easily capable of displaying transparent graphical effects in Vista's Aero interface. Its scores in our Doom 3 and Call of Duty 2 benchmarks show that it's not ideal for games, though.

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If you want to play the latest 3D games, you'll have to lower the resolution or graphical detail, or upgrade to a faster card. Still, there's more than enough 3D power here for older titles.

Although the graphics card has a DVI output, the included 17in AOC monitor has only a D-sub input, so you'll need to fiddle with the settings for the best image quality. Although its colour and greyscale transitions looked surprisingly smooth for such an affordable monitor, white areas looked greyish, making it less than ideal for advanced photo-editing work. The stiff tilt and swivel action is also quite limited, so itfs not easy to get an ideal working position.

The Genius keyboard and mouse are basic but comfortable to use, but you'll want to replace the speakers if you listen to lots of music. Although surprisingly loud, they sound harsh and distort at high volume. The onboard sound card has analogue outputs for connecting a 5.1-channel surround-sound set.

There's only one free PCI slot and one PCI Express x1 slot, which you can use to add peripherals such as a TV tuner or FireWire card. You won't need to add wireless networking, though, as the Zoostorm comes with a 802.11g PCI card. This is an unexpected but welcome addition in such a cheap PC, but the wired Ethernet port doesn't support gigabit Ethernet.

If the 250GB hard disk isn't big enough, you can add another to the free drive bay, and even create a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array if you want. There's also room for another optical drive. A memory card reader is already included but there aren't any FireWire ports. The warranty lasts for just one year, but it's onsite, so you shouldn't have to part with your PC if you need it repaired.

We like the Zoostorm for its low price, speedy dual-core processor and useful extras such as wireless networking. It's not quite as quick as other similarly specified PCs we've seen, but it's very affordable for a decent PC with Vista pre-installed.