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It has a couple of minor weaknesses, but PC Nextday’s Zoostorm 1-3301 Versatile PC is one of the more impressive low-cost systems in this group.
It has all the basics right, starting with a dual-core Pentium D processor that runs at 2.8GHz, and provides a very solid level of basic performance. That’s backed up by a full gigabyte of PC2-667 DDR2 Ram, and an Nvidia Geforce 7300GS graphics card that manages a very respectable 44fps in our Far Cry tests.
Cheap graphics cards tend to be the Achilles’ heel of these low-cost PCs, but the Zoostorm performs well enough to cope admirably with demanding 3D games.
It even has a proper set of external stereo speakers. They’re small, but still provide better sound for music and games than you’ll get from using small speakers built into the monitor (as is the case with most of these PCs here).
With that sort of performance under its belt, video-editing and other multimedia work is no problem. There’s a 250GB hard disk as well, so you have plenty of room for big projects. There’s also a media-card reader on the front of the PC so that you can quickly transfer photos from a digital camera.
Our only minor complaint here is that the Zoostorm doesn’t have any Firewire ports built into it. This means that anyone who owns a DV camcorder may need to buy a Firewire upgrade card if they want to import their video projects into the PC. The bundled software that comes with the Zoostorm is also fairly basic, so you’ll probably need to buy some decent DVD-burning software as well.
It’s not quite the top performer – that honour goes to Watford – and the lack of Firewire is disappointing, but to be fair it’s hard to fault a PC that provides this level of performance and features for just £500.
This article is part of a group test of bargain PCs.
Other articles are:
Ambros Shuttle SS31T
Evesham Axis STR Plus
Mesh D820 Value +
PC Specialist Trident s500
Watford Aries Performa
3500+RV
Is the desktop PC dead?
Graphs and table of features can be read via our Pdf downloads.
All Desktops
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