Advent Centurion CQ9204 review

Advent's Centurion is a gaming PC aimed at those on a budget. It doesn't come with a monitor, but does come with a keyboard and mouse. It looks more expensive than its £650 price would suggest, due to the casings transparent side panel and its unusually-shaped design with red strip lighting. Unfortunately, the beauty is only skin deep and the Centurion falls behind where it matters most.

The Centurion is the first PC we've seen with Nvidia's GeForce GT230 graphics card. Even though it has an impressive 1.5GB of graphics memory, its performance in our demanding 3D benchmarks was disappointing for a PC at this price. It managed a playable, but unremarkable 27.8fps in our Call of Duty 4 test. It struggled with our graphically intense Crysis test, managing just 12.6fps. The Centurion can play current 3D titles, but it will struggle with the very latest games unless you reduce detail settings and the resolution.

We were more impressed by the Centurion's performance in our Windows application benchmarks. It's fitted with a huge 6GB of RAM and a Core 2 Quad Q8300 processor. It scored 90 overall in our tests and it should be able to cope with demanding tasks for some time to come. Its huge amounts of memory make it well suited to HD video editing. However, there are PCs at this price equipped the far quicker Core i5-750 processor.

Although the Centurion is eye-catching, it's also noisy. It's loud enough to be annoying in a quiet room, so you'll want to stow it under your desk. We were also disappointed by the quality of the included peripherals. Both gamers and typists alike will find the keyboard far spongier than is ideal. Although the basic two-button optical mouse works well enough, gamers would have appreciated a model with side buttons or more accurate tracking.

One benefit of the Centurion's design is the number of expansion options available. If the huge 1TB hard disk isn't enough storage, there are five spare 3.5in bays for adding more disks. There are also two empty 5.25in bays for extra optical drives, alongside the usual DVD writer. All this should be more than enough for anyone.

If you actually want to use all the available drive bays, you'll have to add a PCI card with more SATA ports, but the three available SATA ports on the motherboard should suffice for most. There are two spare PCI slots and two empty PCI Express x1 slots, although one of the PCI slots is pressed up against the graphics card slot so it's not usable. You won't need to add a wireless networking adapter though, as an 802.11b/g one is already fitted.

The Centurion's isn't fatally flawed in any respect, but it's simply too expensive at £650. Mesh's similarly priced Matrix II 925 HD is far better value. It doesn't have as many expansion options as the Centurion, but it is far quicker in games, has similar Windows performance and comes with both a Blu-ray drive and monitor.

Author: Kat Orphanides