Multivision Vision nForce 333 review

Vision - Freddie Mercury apparently had one, Mrs Thatcher claimed to possess one and George Bush has been accused of lacking it altogether.

If Multivision could be said to have a vision - and given the name, they should have several - it's probably a little more prosaic: one of dirt-cheap PCs that don't suffer from all the old problems of mediocre specifications, dodgy monitors and other cut-price limitations. If the company's Lab Test-winning Vision Elite LE raised our expectations of just what you can get for £699, the new Vision nForce 333 exceeds them. It's a machine that makes us ask, quite simply: "why pay more?"

This is obvious right from the start. Take the machine's specification. Forget cheap and cheerful Durons or Celerons - Multivision has opted for an Athlon XP 2100+ to power the Vision nForce 333 along. It's a speedy CPU, only 60Mhz slower than the flagship Athlon XP 2200+ and it's sitting pretty in a Leadtek motherboard based on the first-generation nVidia nForce 420D chipset.

The much-vaunted nForce 2 motherboard has yet to arrive, but this particular nForce board seems to have adopted one of its major features already - support for super-fast PC2700 DDR SDRAM. Sadly, the other advanced features and enhancements are still absent. We're particularly sorry to see no support for either USB 2.0 or FireWire. You do, however, get a 10/100BaseT Ethernet port, plus two USB ports at the back, while Multivision has fitted an Intel V.92 PCI modem to cater for those of us still unprepared for fast broadband Internet access.

A stonking 512Mb of PC2700 DDR comes fitted as two DIMMs, with room for one more in the unlikely event you need it. Some nForce motherboards would use a bit of this RAM for the integrated GeForce2 MX graphics, but not this one. Instead, Multivision has taken things up a notch by fitting a 64Mb Gainward GeForce4 Ti 4200 card into the AGP slot. If I were spending my own money on a graphics card, I'd buy this one. It's fast enough, has all the DirectX 8 features you need and doesn't leave a depressing dent in your wallet.

Multivision's choices have been equally smart on the storage front. An 80Gb IBM DeskStar hard disk scores well for both speed and capacity. Lite-On and Jupiter, the makers of the Multivision's DVD and CD-R/W drives respectively, might not be household names, but 16-speed DVD-ROM reading, 40-speed CD-R and 12-speed CD-R/W writing aren't to be sniffed at.

Audio is built into the nForce MCP-D chip, the 'D' standing for Dolby Digital support. nVidia's sound technology was originally designed for the X-Box console, so you can expect it to be handy for 3D game surround. Bizarrely, though, while it can encode Dolby Digital (for sending games sounds to digital speakers), it can't do the more useful job of decoding it for DVD surround. Luckily, the Cyberlink DVD playback software steps in to decode surround DVD soundtracks to pipe to the superb VideoLogic speakers.

The good news continues when you get to the monitor. The Mitsubishi 740SB is one of the better 17in models around, with a bright image, vivid colours and excellent clarity and focus. It will even manage 1,280x1,024 at a respectable 85Hz refresh rate, although your eyes won't thank you if you sit squinting at it at this resolution for long periods. A good Logitech keyboard and mouse just adds to the overall quality.

Having praised the core specification and the peripheral components, you might now be waiting for a big 'but' when it comes to performance. Luckily, there isn't one. 1051 in our 2D applications test really isn't to be sniffed at, and a score of 9217 in 3DMark 2001 proves that games performance is also better than you have any right to expect at this price.