Carrera Octan Ultimate CS-03 review

Gallery

Verdict:

The Octan is a great system with plenty of 2D power, amazing 3D performance and a superb 20" LCD screen. If you're looking for a great all-round PC system, this is the one to buy

Review Date: 23 Jan 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Review
Specs

Carrera's Octan looks slightly pedestrian, but it's powerful and packed with useful features.

FEATURES

The Octan has almost every feature you could expect from a luxury PC. It's got plenty of USB and FireWire ports, two optical drives and a large RAID array that uses two 250GB hard disks. The only notable absence is a memory card reader.

The 20" NEC monitor included has a native resolution of 1,600x1,200, providing plenty of room for large images. Colour accuracy is superb, and it produces smooth shading and a clean, bright white. A USB hub is built in, which is great if you like to tuck your PC case under a desk.

The Creative T7900 7.1 surround-sound speaker set is great for playing games and watching DVDs. Carrera has also included a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 4 sound card.

PERFORMANCE

With 1GB of RAM and a fast dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4400+ processor, the Octan came a close third in our application benchmarks, scoring 158 overall. This places it behind only the two PCs equipped with a faster X2 4600+ processor.

The Octan did even better in our 3D graphics benchmarks. It managed a blistering 132.6fps in our Doom 3 test, which was less than two frames per second behind the fastest PC in the group. This 3D speed comes from a pair of nVidia GeForce 7800GT graphics cards linked by SLI. The only downside of using two cards is that it leaves less room inside the case for expansion.

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