PC Specialist PCS 660GT review

Smart laptops and fancy-pants all-in-one PCs may be the hot products of the moment, but nothing offers quite the bang-per-buck, upgradability and all-round down-to-earth practicality as a straightforward desktop system. The PCS 660GT is one such.

Behind the pretty silver and black fascia is a fast Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 dual-core processor and the latest graphics card from nVidia: a GeForce 8600GT. It might not be the top-of-the-range, but this card crucially supports DirectX 10, and that means it will let you play the very latest games with the top visual effects. It managed a decent 24.4 frames per second (fps) in our test running Call of Duty 2, which stretches a PC pretty hard. If that proves too weedy when DirectX 10 games eventually appear, there's a second graphics card slot where you can install a second 8600GT for extra power rather than having to chuck it out and buy a pricier card from scratch.

With 2GB of RAM (and space for another 2GB if you need it), the PC Specialist had no problem in our benchmark tests, racking up a respectable 175% and proving that it can easily cope with just about anything you can throw at it. It isn't the quietest PC we've heard, with the graphics card fan being particularly noisy. But it's good to see lots of room to add drives in the future, and the reasonable 450W power supply has plenty of spare connectors.

Front row seat

While all the processing power is fine for work and gaming, PC Specialist is clearly intending the 660GT to double up as an entertainment system. For a start, it comes with Vista Home Premium, which includes Media Center. To make full use of its features, there's a Freeview tuner for watching and recording TV, while an infrared remote control means you can control everything from the comfort of a sofa.

You won't want to sit too far away, though, as the 19in screen isn't huge. It's a real shame that it isn't widescreen, because any movies or widescreen TV shows you watch will only use the middle third of the screen, with black 'letterbox' bars above and below.

This aside, the Hanns-G HU196D isn't a bad budget monitor. It has both VGA (analogue) and DVI (digital) inputs. PC Specialist includes a DVI cable in the box, and even when we tested the monitor with a VGA cable it still looked bright and crisp. Videos play fluidly, and colours are generally accurate enough for editing photos. The only slight problem is a narrow vertical viewing angle, which means that faint vertical lines (like those in a Windows Explorer box) can disappear halfway down the screen.

The screen has speakers built in at the base, handy if you're short of space but not well suited to music, movies or atmospheric gaming, so it's good to see a set of Creative Inspire T6100 speakers bundled too. They provide good quality surround sound, but the cables are all captive rather than replaceable plug-in ones, so you're limited to placing them relatively close to the PC. The keyboard and mouse are cordless, though, keeping your desk neat.

Peace of mind?

Last month we looked at Evesham's Solar 8600GTS, which costs £100 more than the PC Specialist but has a faster GeForce 8600GTS graphics card and a much larger 22in widescreen monitor. It also comes with a three-year warranty, the first two on-site, meaning the engineer comes to you instead of having to send the PC back. PC Specialist offers just one year of collect-and-return cover with the 660GT, which doesn't do much for your peace of mind. On the other hand, the TV tuner, Media Center remote control and included Wi-Fi card are decent extras that complement decent overall performance. As long as you can live with a bit of noise and without widescreen, and don't mind compromising on the warranty, it's good value.