Carrera Octan 64 CB160 review

Carrera's trademark shiny black case conceals a surprisingly powerful system, given the tight budget.

Carrera's machine is based around an Athlon XP 3000+ processor that's significantly more powerful than the 2500+ models fitted in its competitors. Although the Athlon XP is soon to be phased out in favour of AMD's more advanced Athlon 64 chip, high-powered XP chips like this one still have enough power for everyday computing tasks.

The processor is paired with a sensible 512MB of RAM. Unlike the memory used in the other machines, Carrera's is the faster 400MHz variety, and 512MB is pretty much standard these days - it's enough to keep your system running smoothly.

Like all the £499 PCs, the Carrera comes with the NEC ND2500A DVD writer. This drive handles both the competing DVD formats: DVD+R (and its rewriteable equivalent +RW), as well as DVD-R and -RW. The two standards have minor differences: -R is better for making DVD Video discs for use in ordinary DVD players, as discs are more likely to be compatible with older DVD players. On the other hand, +R allows you more flexibility when editing files on the disc. Having a drive that handles both is useful as it will let you use whichever is better for your purposes. As well as burning DVDs, the drive can record CDs as well. Because of the cost of the drive, none of the £499 systems has a second DVD drive. You'd expect that in a more expensive system, to allow you to back up CD or DVD discs directly - but in a budget machine, a single drive is acceptable. You can always add another later for less than £30.

The sound quality of the bundled 2.1 OG-310 speakers isn't too impressive, but Carrera more than makes up for this by including a Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 All-in-Wonder graphics card, which has a built-in TV tuner. This allows you to watch and even record TV on your PC.

Carrera has fitted a 120GB Hitachi Deskstar hard disk. Installing game demos or copying the contents of CDs or DVDs to your hard disks can eat up gigabytes at a time. 120GB should be enough to prevent most people running out of storage.

You're never going to get a state-of-the-art monitor at this price. The system's Samtron 76e 17in CRT isn't great - its screen is slightly concave - but it has good focus, so overall it's acceptable. Similarly, the Microsoft Basic mouse and keyboard aren't fancy, but they get the job done. The keyboard feels a bit flimsy, but it's more pleasant to type on than the one supplied with the Aria's. The mouse feels light, and it's not a fancy wireless model, but it is the low-maintenance optical variety, and it's accurate.

To get the best value out of a budget machine, you should be able to expand it. That way you can keep pace with technology and add upgrades and peripherals when your budget grows or prices fall. Carrera's machine has no less than three 5.25in drive bays with openings at the front of the case, so that you can fit extra CD or DVD drives - or even drives for the more advanced disk formats that are on the horizon. There are four internal bays for extra hard disks and three free PCI slots, so you should be able to upgrade to your heart's content. There's a single spare slot for extra memory - the maximum amount of 400MHz RAM this motherboard can handle is 2GB, although taking the memory past 1GB would be overkill for most of us. There's little scope to upgrade the processor, as it's near the top of the Athlon XP line. Six USB 2 ports let you connect external peripherals ranging from printers to joysticks to digital cameras - but sadly there are no FireWire ports.