Systemax Inspire 7512 review

It may not sound like a lot of money, but £586 is enough to get you a PC that's good enough for most people's computing needs. Systemax shows us how it's done with its Inspire 7512.

Decked out in black and silver, the blocky tower case won't win any awards for style, but it's functional. It's also fairly well designed with a couple of front mounted USB2.0 ports.

The rear of the PC provides a further six USB2.0 ports and 5.1 surround sound. FireWire is the only noticeable omission, but you can't have everything for this price.

The PC incorporates a brand new AMD Sempron 2800+ processor, which is part of the new value range designed to compete against Intel's Celeron. This 32-bit processor is similar in operation to an Athlon XP. For a full review of this new processor, see our Components section on page 58.

The processor is backed up by 512MB of PC3200 RAM, which is generous considering the price. A lot of budget PCs include only 256MB, which isn't enough for Windows XP to work comfortably.

In our tests the PC scored 3,077 in PCMark 2004 and 116 in SYSmark2004. These scores are far behind those of PCs using the latest processors, but they shouldn't be dismissed lightly. For general office and internet applications this PC will prove more than adequate.

Gaming isn't out of the question either thanks to the 128MB nVidia GeForce FX 5700 graphics card. It's fairly old in graphics card terms but still surprisingly nippy. It scored 2,308 in 3DMark03, which is commendable and means that this PC will happily handle the latest games, although you won't be able to play them at maximum resolution and detail settings.

Most people probably expect an LCD monitor these days, but the price prohibits this and the 17" flat CRT display supplied has good image quality.

A 120GB SATA hard disk provides the storage. It's a modest disk by today's standards and you may find that it gets full quickly, especially if you store a lot of digital photographs and MP3s. If you don't, it will prove sufficient for general storage.

If you're running out of space, you can always archive your old files using the DVD/CD-RW combo drive. This is the only optical drive so you can't do any disc-to-disc copies.

It's good to see that Systemax includes Microsoft Works 7. As a second PC or cheap, basic family PC the Inspire is a good deal. You may want to add a larger hard disk and an LCD monitor, though.