Packard Bell 1538 Entertainment PC review

The high street has never been the best place to buy a PC - the selection is usually limited to a handful of brand names; you seldom get the chance to tweak the specifications to your liking and you tend to pay a price premium to help cover the shop's operating costs.

With the demise of Time and Tiny, of course, there aren't even that many high street PC outlets these days, which means most people looking to get a PC now (and not 'up to 28 days later') simply nip to PC World and pick up a computer like the Packard Bell 1538.

At £660, the 1538 sits firmly in the mid-range category and if our past PC reviews are anything to go buy, this is certainly more than enough money to bag a first-rate system. On paper, at least, the 1538 doesn't look like amazing value for money, but like we said, that's high street prices for you. Its 512MB of RAM is a little stingy, but at least Packard Bell has been thoughtful enough to provide it all on one DIMM, leaving three slots free for further use. The 3GHz Pentium 4 processor, however, is rather appealing, not least because there can't be many people who haven't been barraged with its benefits by Intel's marketing campaigns.

cheap chipS

Unfortunately, there's rather more to the 1538's processor than meets the eye, or as it turns out, rather less. The Pentium 4 519 chip used in the 1538 is a budget model, aimed at PC manufacturers who want the cachet of the Pentium 4 name, but need to keep costs down.

That's not to say that the processor is a poor performer - it's a 3GHz chip after all, and its 2D benchmark score is more than acceptable. What it doesn't have are the latest performance enhancing bells and whistles that Intel uses in its mainstream Pentium 4 range. In other words, there's no Hyper-Threading and no dual core, and if you plan to use your PC for any processor intensive tasks, you'd really benefit from one or the other.

Oddly enough, Packard Bell hasn't shaved that much off the 1538's price by opting for this processor. A glance online revealed that it only costs a few quid less than a 3GHz HT Pentium 4 with twice the amount of cache.

corner-cutting

Unfortunately, corner-cutting is evident pretty much everywhere else on the 1538. The nVidia GeForce 6200LE/TC PCI Express graphics card is a cut-down version of a card that's already a budget model, and it really shows. Its miserable performance in our 3D tests is due not only to its crippled specification, but also to the fact that it supplements its 64MB of onboard memory with 192MB of main memory when it runs a 3D game. This means that the 1538's 512MB of RAM gets spread rather thinly when playing 3D games, since both the game and Windows itself need a fair chunk of it too.

The rest of the 1538's specification isn't quite so poor, but it's fair to say that you could get far more for your money from any of the big mail order suppliers. The 160GB hard disk is surprisingly large, but Packard Bell has made the bizarre decision to split it into two partitions - a far-too-small 30GB C: drive and a far-too-large 111GB D: drive. This is easily fixed with a free partitioning program, but it'd make far more sense to leave the drive alone and let users decide how to organise it themselves.

The inclusion of Windows XP Media Center Edition is another odd inclusion, but it does mean that you get a TV tuner as part of the package. The bad news is that both this and the 56K modem occupy the only two PCI slots, so you'll need to chuck something out if you want to install anything else. The lack of FireWire and just four USB 2 ports might limit external expansion options, but there are two 3.5in and one 5.25in drive bays free, should you need them.