Product Reviews

Advent's T9403 is aimed at those who need a powerful PC for intensive tasks, such as video and photo editing. It packs a headline-grabbing 2GB of RAM and a Pentium 4 570 processor running at 3.8GHz, currently the fastest in Intel's range.

While this pushes the PC to one of the best Shopper application benchmark scores we've ever seen, further investigation reveals problems with the configuration. First, the two 250GB hard disks are not configured in a RAID array, leaving you with two drives to manage. As the motherboard supports RAID, we'd have expected either a mirrored drive for on-the-fly data backup, or striping for performance.

Both SATA disks are of the older type that uses a standard four-pin power connector rather than the SATA connector. In fact, the power supply has no SATA power connectors, which is unusual for a new

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PC. It also lacks the PCI-E power connector for the graphics card, so Advent has used a converter.

Even stranger is the choice of graphics card: an ATI Radeon X700Pro with 256MB of memory can just about run the latest games but not at the high detail or resolutions that the processor can manage. A Radeon X800XL, 1GB of RAM and a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 would be a more balanced choice.

The T9403 comes with an unbranded DVI-fed 19" monitor. Colours are faithful and the picture is sharp and reasonably bright. It suffers from a slow pixel refresh time, though, so fast motion tends to blur. The monitor is also a little ugly and feels less robust than the well-made case.

Strangest of all are the wireless keyboard and mouse. Somehow Advent has managed to find a ball-mouse. At this price it's inexcusable that the company hasn't included an optical model. Things improve slightly with the Philips A3.610 flat-panel speaker system, which is one of the more desirable sets we've seen.

Finally, an analogue TV tuner card enables you to watch and record programmes. There's also a bundled remote control, although the interface it controls is not as good as Windows Media Center's.

Ultimately we can't recommend this PC as it has an unbalanced specification. A marginally slower processor and less memory would have left enough money for a better graphics card. We think Advent should rethink its choice of components.