Aria Family Extra 3800+ review

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Verdict:

The older parts Aria has used make this PC fairly slow in many of our benchmarks, but it's the monitor, keyboard and speakers that really disappoint. The extras are nice, but we think most people would rather select their own software and printer.

Review Date: 19 Jan 2007

Price when reviewed: £749

Reviewed By: Seth Barton

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

This PC comes with lots of extras and is capable of performing a wide range of tasks straight from the box. It's not very fast in Windows, though.

FEATURES

Aria has included an Epson R265 photo inkjet printer. This is an excellent printer that's ideal for digital photographers, but we've seen far better inkjets for printing text. The large software bundle includes a copy of Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003. This should be useful to just about anyone, but you must have a student or teacher living in your household to qualify to use this special edition.

The total cost of all these extras, if bought separately, is £188. It's not surprising, then, that sacrifices have been made elsewhere. It has a 17in monitor, where all the other PCs have 19in models. It's not the brightest display here, but it has wide viewing angles.

The speakers, keyboard and mouse are some of the worst we've ever seen and will all need replacing. Aria provides only a one-year return-to-base warranty.

PERFORMANCE

This is the only PC in the group to use a single-core processor. Its AMD Athlon 64 3800+ runs at 2.4GHz, and the PC came third in our image-manipulation test. It couldn't keep up in the video-editing and multitasking benchmarks, though, so its overall score of 125 is the worst in the group.

The Aria uses an Nvidia GeForce 6800GT graphics chip. When first released this was among the fastest available, and its score of 51.6fps in our Doom 3 test is impressive. It's far slower in more recent games, though, and managed only 19.1fps in Call of Duty 2.

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