Product Reviews

The Esprimo E5905 is marketed as a green PC that is made to environmentally-friendly standards and uses as little power as possible. It is very quiet; often the only audible noise comes from the optical drive spinning up. Even this can be controlled using software that changes the speed of the drive.

It's not as small as a Mac mini, but it still takes up less space than your average mini tower and is only around the same size as a telephone directory. This does mean there are only two PCI slots and one 31/2" drive bay, but it seems a reasonable trade-off. Removing the case to add internal upgrades is simple enough. There's a slot for a lock to prevent theft of valuable components and data.

The E5905 is aimed at bulk business buyers, but it is also available to individual consumers. The bundled software is designed for use in environments where the E5905 will be deployed in numbers,

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with remote management software and disk-cloning software similar to Norton Ghost included.

The fact that the E5905 is aimed at business users is also evident in the machine's meagre RAM, hard disk and optical drive. The spongy keyboard and ball mouse are rather cheap. Although the nVidia Quadro NVS 280 PCI Express graphics card isn't built for gaming, it is capable of driving two displays at the same time. This is useful for palette-heavy and screen-hogging applications such as Excel, or financial trading and page layout software. The E5905 can also be ordered with integrated graphics and a single D-sub socket for £71 less.

Given this business-oriented approach, the powerful 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 D 820 dual-core processor may seem like overkill, especially given the scarcity of optimised software. Complex bespoke statistical and number-crunching software could benefit, once rewritten to take advantage. But it's fast enough to cope with office applications, and it's more likely to be you pausing for thought that will slow things down, not the processor.

The E5905 did well in our video-encoding test, but the lack of FireWire ports and small hard disk make it unsuitable for anything other than casual video editing.

Although the E5905 is aimed at companies, it will meet your needs if you're looking for a small and quiet yet powerful business PC. However, home users or less-demanding office users would be better served with cheaper alternatives.