Watford Aries Performa 9048 review

Verdict:

Despite blistering 3D power, the Performa's 17" screen limits its desirability for gaming. It's also the slowest PC here for 2D Windows applications.

Review Date: 20 Oct 2004

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

In a push for bigger and better storage, Watford has supplied the Performa 9048 with two hard disks in a Raid 0 array. This provides faster access to your files and, this month, the most storage space on offer too.

Features

To pay for the double hard disk system at the core of the Performa, Watford has had to limit the monitor size to 17". The Iiyama ProLite E431S display is an impressive performer, though, with bright and flawlessly clean colours and only slight inaccuracies in our greyscale test.

The case is awkward to use, with a recessed floppy disk drive and fiddly drive covers which obscure their eject buttons when open. The obligatory front-mounted USB2.0, FireWire and audio ports are located at the bottom of the case, with more of each on the back panel.

With a large heat sink and fan on its graphics card, the Performa is one of the quieter systems on test this month. Surround sound for games and movies comes through an ugly but reasonably effective set of Altec Lansing 251 speakers. The keyboard and mouse are made by Logitech and are excellent. Watford provides one of the more extensive software bundles this month, which includes Ability Office 2002.

Performance

A relatively low-speed processor, the AMD Athlon 3000+, is balanced here by the inclusion of a powerful graphics card and fast hard disk system. The resultant Doom 3 score of 63.3fps is unrivalled in this group and the 3DMark03 score of 10,877 is also excellent. Both these scores indicate exceptional gaming performance, but the score of 98 in our Computer Shopper applications benchmark is disappointing.

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