Review: Very PC Green PC 940 BE desktop PC

Green is in, that's for sure, with electronics manufacturers queuing up to tout their environmentally friendly credentials.

Very PC has been making green computers for a while and this is the latest in its range. With its small form factor, surround-sound output and HDMI port it's ostensibly a media computer, but Very PC's desire to keep the power consumption down means it lacks, among other items, a TV tuner card.

The processor is an AMD Athlon X2 BE-2300 dual-core chip running at 1.9GHz; Very PC tells us that free upgrades to the faster 2.1GHz chip are also available. The 'BE' is a codename for AMD's line of energy-efficient Brisbane processors, which draw only 45W of power compared to the 90-110W used by greedier chips. This does mean that the L2 cache memory is kept down to only 512KB per core, which has a negative effect on performance.

It comes with 1GB of DDR2 memory, which is sufficient to run the supplied Windows Vista Home Premium, but we'd recommend an upgrade to 2GB. Graphics are supplied by the onboard ATI X1250 chip. This isn't going to cope with recent games, but is capable of playing back DVD movies, for instance.

Performance is reasonable, and although the Green PC 940 BE only scores 2.9 on the Windows Vista Experience Index, this is due to the slow graphics card.

Storage takes the form of a 2.5in low-power Seagate hard disk with a 100GB capacity, along with a full-size DVD rewriter (all formats are supported except DVD-Ram), and there's a spare bay with a front-panel blanking plate for another 5.25in drive.

The 940 BE would be a good choice as a home-entertainment computer - the form factor means it would sit comfortably among hi-fi gear and a DVD player, and the computer's front panel looks are not out of keeping with that kind of use. You'll also need to invest in a TV tuner.

Given the low price, it's no great surprise that this PC doesn't come with a monitor or speakers as standard; neither do you get a keyboard or mouse. Furthermore, there's no wireless networking capability, but it does come with a standard Ethernet port; in these days of powerline networking, hooking your desktop PC up to your network via the mains is often preferable.

The built-in soundcard is fine for almost all purposes and there are six USB2 ports (two on the front panel and another four on the rear). There's also a Firewire port and the aforementioned HDMI output, in addition to the standard VGA port for connecting a monitor (an HDMI-DVI adapter is in the box).

The Green PC Struggled through our benchmarks, which is no great surprise considering the relatively low-spec components. PCmark05 returned a score of 3,775 in the CPU section, 1,064 in the graphics section and 3,156 overall, while the Radeon X1250 graphics card could only power the computer to 902 in 3Dmark05 and 317 in 3Dmark06.

Despite these scores, the Very PC Green PC 940 BE will cope well with office tasks and general internet use. Its green credentials hold up as well - when idle, power consumption sat just below 50W, only rising to around 60-70W when put under strain. However, don't expect to be able to run too many programs at once, or for it to be able to cope with new games or video editing.

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!