Advent T9402 review

Built by Medion, a large German PC manufacturer, Advent's T9402 is slightly better kitted out than the company's usual PCs.

Housed in a plain-looking silver case, all of the ports and drives are hidden behind flaps and doors. Slide down the main door and you've got a connection panel, which houses two USB2, two FireWire, a 9-in-1 memory card reader, and audio and video inputs. There's not a lot you have to reach round the back of the case for. For more permanent peripherals, the rear houses further USB2, FireWire and network ports. With a wireless 802.11g PCI card as standard, you can connect this PC to virtually any network.

The T9402 also comes with an RF remote-control receiver, which would have been better integrated into the case, and a TV card. It is designed to be a media centre and is preinstalled with CyberLink's PowerCinema. The software gives you access to photos, videos, TV and radio. You can set up recordings using a paid-for internet EPG service, such as DigiGuide, or through Teletext.

As this PC is built using a tower case, it will look out of place attached to a TV. Advent has therefore provided its own Proview 190 19" LCD. Capable of a 1,280x1,024 resolution, picture quality is decent, although it has only an analogue input. However, as this is a media PC, we feel that a widescreen monitor would have been a more suitable option, as it is better for watching DVDs.

The package doesn't come with speakers but if you order online from the PC World website, you get a free Philips A3.610 5.1 set. However, the PC is capable of outputting eight-channel sound, so we would have expected speakers to match.

The T9402 works well as a PC too. While many media centre computers have reduced specs, this is a powerful PC in its own right. The Pentium 4 570 processor, running at 3.8GHz, combined with 1GB of RAM makes for a powerful PC, as you can see from the benchmark scores. The 256MB ATI Radeon X700 Pro, while not the fastest card on the market, can still cope with all of the latest games at playable frame rates. As far as storage is concerned, the T9402 ships with two 250GB SATA hard disks and a 16x DVD rewriter as well, which is ample.

As PCs go, it's well built and the media centre functions are a nice addition. However, at £1,599, the T9402 is expensive and better deals can be found elsewhere.