Packard Bell Club 80 review

Think household name.

You're probably picturing a Daz Automatic box, a Mars bar or maybe Ken Dodd. PCs don't spring so readily to mind, despite their manufacturer's best efforts, but Packard Bell is about as familiar as they come. Quite probably, you'll have already encountered its PCs in high street shops. And, with the backing of a multinational company, plus perks like 24-hour technical support and a one-year on-site warranty, they do appear quite attractive buys.

Packard Bell are masters of what media types call 'product differentiation'. Their machines sell largely because they appear very different from those of their competitors. In particular, Packard Bell PCs come in the strangest shapes and sizes. Some of its more esoteric and futuristic efforts have not, sadly, stood the test of time (we even recall a delta-shaped desktop that was designed to fit in a corner).

However, many of its toned-down curvy efforts are rather pleasing, and the Club 80 is a case in point. It has aerodynamic curves where others have right-angles.

Along with its individual aesthetics, the Club 80 has a striking practical design feature too. Packard Bell has placed a USB socket at the front of the machine, to save you the trouble of fumbling behind the machine when inserting and removing devices.

As usual, you can gain access to the Packard Bell's guts through a side panel, which detaches easily. When the system bears all, you can see a small but tidy interior, dominated by the big Pentium III 450 processor. The motherboard is compact, despite having built-in sound and graphics. For upgrading purposes, there are one ISA and three PCI slots available. A V.90 (56Kbps) fax modem card occupies one PCI place. The machine would still offer enough upgrade potential for average users if Packard Bell hadn't made one critical omission - there's no AGP slot.

The machine's 8Mb ATI Rage Pro AGP graphics was once a reasonable performer, but as we saw in last month's graphics card round up, things have moved on considerably. It's quite probable you'd want to upgrade from the Rage Pro, particularly if you intend playing games. But without an AGP slot, your options are limited.

The 64Mb of RAM on offer is a bit lean these days, but you can easily add more, as there's a free memory socket. You also get a free 5.25in front-opening drive bay, which would do nicely for a CD writer or Zip drive.

The Club comes with one of Packard Bell's own-brand monitors, in this case a 15in unit with a viewable diagonal of 13.6in. It has simple pushbutton digital controls, which let you set up the basic size and position of the picture, and alleviate standard shape problems. The monitor works best at 800x600 resolution - go higher and everything gets fuzzy and small.

The monitor is supplied with a pair of 5W speakers, which can be mounted like ears on either side. They draw power from an outlet at the back of the monitor, which saves you looking for another mains socket. In truth, though, the speakers, though adequately loud and crisp, aren't as sophisticated as a pair of Yamahas or Altec Lansings.

The Club's big disappointment is performance. The sluggish ATI graphics and mediocre Fujitsu hard disk both make their presence felt in a poor benchmark score. More RAM would have been a boon, but however you slice the cake, this is a slow machine - particularly for a Pentium III 450 - and for this reason we can't recommend it. If you're looking to spend around the same amount of money, think about the Polar Prot??from September's issue.

Author: - Dominic Bucknall