Watford Aries PowerXS 6444 CS-03 review

Verdict:

The Aries is cheaper than most PCs here, and might appeal to those who want a luxury PC on a tighter budget. We'd spend £150 more on one of the better systems, though

Review Date: 23 Jan 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The Aries is one of the more affordable PCs in this month's group, but with uninspiring performance it's not the bargain it might seem.

FEATURES

Watford's understated Coolermaster case feels solid and well designed and has plenty of drive bays for future expansion. You may need to fill these sooner rather then later, though, as only a single 250GB hard disk is included.

Annoyingly, there are no FireWire ports. This and the small hard disk limit the PowerXS's usefulness for video editing. The basic wired Microsoft keyboard and mouse are adequate for most uses, but we expected better at this price.

The 20" ViewSonic display has a handy integrated four-port USB hub. The screen is sharp, but it struggled in our greyscale test. The pivot function works well as long as you use ATI's Catalyst Control Centre software.

PERFORMANCE

Like the Gladiator Titan 3, the PowerXS uses an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ processor. This is one of the slowest processors in the group. It scored a mediocre 155 in our application benchmarks, including a poor 112 in our image-editing test.

The Aries fared similarly in our Doom 3 test, where it produced 91.2fps. Only the Hoojum and Evesham PCs were slower. Its ATI Radeon X1800XT is a decent graphics card but it can't match a single nVidia GeForce 7800GTX card, let alone an SLI system. Unlike other single-card PCs in the group, this one can't be upgraded to a two-card system in future.

Prev Next

Get more reviews, tutorials and in-depth advice, every month with Computer Shopper.
Click here to try 3 issues for £1

< Previous Reviews : PCs Next >

Sponsored Links

Be the first to comment on this article

You need to Login or Register to comment.