Advent PDQ5002 review

Stunning looks usually have to be sacrificed with budget PCs, but Advent's PDQ5002 has one of the more attractive cases. Its front has a plastic slide-down door, which requires a firm shove to open, and a blue light at the bottom.

Inside, wiring is reasonably neat, although it does feel cramped. The Foxconn processor fan makes quite a racket, but it's not as noisy as the one used by Mesh's Elite PC, while a rear case fan helps keep the air circulating.

Thanks to the 500GB hard disk, you'll be able to store plenty of music, videos and photos. Should you need to free up space, the DVD writer is ready and waiting.

A quad-core 2.2GHz AMD Phenom 9550 processor is used, although Advent's choice of motherboard means it can't quite run at its full potential. The Foxconn AV6MX supports only HyperTransport 1.0, so this bus speed is limited to 1,000MHz as opposed to the 1,800MHz the processor supports. The 4GB of RAM is also a little slower than usual, coming in the form of two PC2-5300 2GB modules; the other PCs use PC2-6400 RAM. These shortcomings aren't too serious, though. If you run multiple applications the benefits of quad-core will be noticeable, but this PC did slip behind the other Phenom 9550 system, Packard Bell's iMedia 2426.

In another cost-cutting measure, Advent has chosen integrated graphics in the form of ATI's Radeon X1200, so gaming isn't possible. At a resolution of 1,680x1050, we couldn't get a score from Crysis or Call of Duty 4. We did manage 6fps at 1,024x768 with Call of Duty 4, but this isn't a playable speed. The PCMark Vantage score places this PC near the bottom of the group for performance. The poor showing in the Memories suite is the result of it not being able to run all the tests, due to the onboard graphics; Arbico's PC suffered a similar fate.

Small, compact and attravailable, it will appeal to anyone who wants a PC for basic office and web tasks, but spend around £30 more and you can get a much faster system.