Eclipse Eco a50 review

Eclipse has managed to submit a complete PC, including an 18.5in widescreen display, for just £400 including VAT.

To keep the price down, the Eco a50 uses some budget components, but Eclipse has done a good job of picking them so that there are no obvious weak areas.

The 2.6GHz dual-core Athlon 64 X2 5050e processor may be one of AMD's older chips, but it's still capable. The 2GB of RAM helped this PC managed an overall benchmark score twice that of Novatech's Ion Fusion nettop.

As you'd expect at this price, there's no dedicated graphics card, and the onboard Radeon 3100 graphics chip isn't capable of playing games. However, it can decode 1080p HD video, so you could use your PC to watch movies if you add a Blu-ray drive. For would-be gamers, there's a free PCI Express x16 slot, so adding a dedicated graphics card such as Sapphire's £84 Radeon HD 4830 is easy. As the motherboard supports Hybrid CrossFireX, you can add an ATI card and use both graphics chips together for slightly better performance.

As well as the free graphics card slot, there are two free RAM slots for up to 8GB of memory, although you'd have to switch to the 64-bit version of Windows to take advantage of all that RAM. Expansion isn't limited to the inside of the case, as a total of eight USB ports provide plenty of room for peripherals.

The 18.5in widescreen monitor seems a real bonus at this price, but it's not quite as good as we'd hoped for and it has a resolution of 1,366x768, the same as a 720p HD TV. This appears quite a low resolution for the monitor's size. Fortunately, picture quality is excellent, with accurate colours and a bright, even backlight. There's a range of preset picture settings, so you can quickly change the image settings to match the content you're viewing.

If performance is more important than size but you still want a PC on a low budget, the Eco A50 is a better choice than the nettops. For just £400 you get a decent computer, although if you can stretch your budget further, Mesh's Nero 9950HD is a better choice.

Author: Barry de la Rosa