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It takes a fairly expensive PC to run Vista with the full visual effects, surely?
Not according to PC Nextday, which is selling a Zoostorm PC for under £500 that, it claims, can run the full version of Vista – Home Premium – complete with the Aero visual effects.
The computer comes with a Pentium D 820 processor clocked at 2.8GHz.
The Pentium D is certainly not the most recent of processors and, while dual core, is nowhere near as powerful or efficient as the latest processors carrying Intel's Core 2 Duo branding.
A Core 2 Duo chip clocked at a lower speed will easily outperform the 2.8GHz Pentium D in this Zoostorm PC.
That's borne out by the test results: it managed 4,117 in PCmark05, which is reasonable, if unspectacular, and pretty much where we would expect to find a PC with this CPU. The 1GB of memory is small and, although it doesn't appear to present a significant bottleneck, you'd be likely to increase performance a fair bit by adding another gigabyte.
However, the two memory slots on the motherboard are already taken, so it will be a case of throwing away (or selling) some Ram in order to upgrade.
Where it really falls down is in the realm of graphics capabilities. The graphics card – an Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS with 256MB of Ram – is reasonable, but it's a generation down from the top of the range, which means it struggles to cope with recent games at high resolution and detail settings.
We'd have expected slightly better graphics performance from such a card, but it came out with an extremely low score of just 2,322 in 3Dmark05. This is well below most of the PCs we've looked at recently, but it's fair to say that no-one buying a £500 PC should expect it to be a gaming powerhouse.
That said, it's perfectly capable of dealing with Aero, Vista's fancy 3D display system. Even with the visual effects turned on, the Vista desktop was smooth and fluid and exhibited none of the performance problems we've seen on some lower-spec machines.
Otherwise, this PC is well stocked. It comes with a 250GB Western Digital hard disk (serial ATA, naturally) and a 16x DVD writer. There's the obligatory memory card reader which, although useful, takes up the only external 3.5in drive bay. That leaves one internal 3.5in bay free for another hard disk, as well as a spare 5.25in bay below the DVD drive.
There's only one free PCI slot, and only one free serial ATA socket on the motherboard. A single spare IDE socket sits on the motherboard should you want to fill that spare larger bay with another DVD drive or even a Blu-ray or HD-DVD device.
Connections-wise, it comes with 802.11g support built in and an Ethernet port. The package includes a budget, but decent performing 17in AOC LM-765 LCD monitor (which PC Nextday sells for £111) and a pair of stereo speakers, although the latter are not up to much. The keyboard and mouse, while perfectly useable, are also not very pleasant for long-term use, and it might be worth picking up a decent Logitech or Microsoft set.
Overall, the Zoostorm 2-3305 is a reasonable choice for an average home user, but while it's capable of dealing with office tasks, light gaming and general Vista usage, any recent game on high quality settings will certainly tax it. However, if you're after a Vista machine and are on a budget, you should certainly consider this model.
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All Desktops Tags: Desktop PC
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