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For many years, the price of a medium to-good PC was about £1,100. That would get the buyer a computer that, while not top of the range, would certainly last for a few years before needing an upgrade.
In recent years, however, that benchmark has dropped, and it is now possible to get a perfectly good desktop computer for less than £600, so what does the extra £500 for this PC buy?
The Mesh Matrix Vector X2-Fi’s main distinguishing feature is its use of a dual-core processor. Until this year, every home computer used a 'single-core' processor, which meant it could only do one thing at a time (although the computer could run many applications, the processor itself was only completing one task).
AMD's dual-core technology means that there are effectively two processors running simultaneously, so the computer is capable in theory of doing things twice as fast.
The snag is that software has to be specially written to take advantage of this, so for most uses the speed increase is small. The processor in this computer is 64-bit which, again, requires specially-written software to benefit fully and, for most home users, provides only a small speed gain.
However, these technologies will become more widespread over the next few years, which means this computer should be able to take advantage of future program developments.
It uses an AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ processor and 1Gb of memory. As expected, it performs very well, scoring very highly in our tests and reflecting the fact that this is a very fast computer.
The ATI Radeon X800XL graphics card, which has 256Mb of its own memory, means that it is able to play the latest games with high levels of detail and a realistic frame rate.
Audio is provided by the excellent Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music sound card. There is a Creative Labs Inspire T7900 7.1 surround sound speaker system as well.
In addition to Windows XP Home, it comes with Microsoft Works 8, DVD playback and disc creation software, backup software and a trial version of Microsoft Office.
Alongside all the usual connections are six USB 2 ports and a wireless Logitech mouse and keyboard. There's also a Matrix Vector X2-Fi comes with a three-year warranty (first year on-site, UK mainland only).
One thing to be aware of is that, owing to all the high-power hardware in the PC case, the power consumption is high, and the computer has a 550W power supply.
This is higher than most desktop PCs and will cause more of a drain on your electricity bill. It may not seem like a big difference, but it is perhaps a 50 per cent increase on an older PC.
Overall, this is a powerful computer that should be able to run new software for longer than cheaper PCs, and for £1,100, it's excellent value for money.
See also:
All Desktops
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