Microland Addons CB 2200+ review

With its plain two-tone case, the Microland doesn't look particularly special, but it has a lot going for it where it counts.

Features

Microland has used VideoLogic's ZXR-550 surround sound speakers, which won our Top 50 Best Buy award when we reviewed them in April. The system also comes with a 10/100 network controller, 256MB of RAM and an 80GB hard disk. Its motherboard includes an onboard RAID controller, too. This allows you to team up two or more hard disks to work together for greater speed or data security. Not bad at all for only £599 excluding VAT!

Ergonomics

Like the VideoLogic speakers, the Philips monitor is an award winner in its own right. In our March 2003 issue it picked up a Top 50 Best Buy award, seeing off rivals in our flat-panel group test. We liked its bright, clean colours, good contrast and cleanly rendered images. Microland's optical wheel mouse is a treat to use - and again we were particularly pleased to see such a good mouse included with a system at this price.

Expansion

You have to admire someone who can put together a system with such inordinately chunky cables and still manage to make sure none of them obscures the PC's bits and bobs. That's just as well, as there's plenty of expansion potential in this case, and it would be a shame if the various slots and bays were tricky to get at. Thankfully, that isn't the case: the two free memory slots are easy to access, and the PCI slots pose no problems either. The only slight inconvenience is that you'll have to push the hard disk's power cables out of the way to get to the free 3.5in bays, but that couldn't really be avoided. If all that rummaging around inside the case doesn't take your fancy, the Microland comes with an impressive six USB ports for plugging in external devices.

Performance

Along with the other Radeon 9000-based machines, this system clocks up a cracking score in our 3D benchmarks. Not all the credit should go to the graphics card, though - the 400MHz DDR RAM and Athlon XP 2200+ also play their part.

Overall

This system really is a good all-rounder. It's not as fast as the Campus, but it has a better monitor. And while it doesn't have as many features as the Multivision, it's quite a bit more powerful. We suspect that Microland has been doing its homework, combing our back issues to find award-winning products to use in its PCs. If that's the case, it has certainly helped it put together a smashing system. Well done!