Carrera Vision Plus CS-04 review

Verdict:

Carrera has been generous in its choice of monitor and warranty for the Vision. If it were a little faster in Windows, it could have been a contender for this month's top spot.

Review Date: 21 Feb 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The Vision Plus CS-04 looks as if it costs considerably more than it does, with a smart and understated case plus a big, bright monitor.

FEATURES

Unsurprisingly for a budget PC, the Vision comes with only 512MB of RAM. If you want to get the best possible performance from memory-hungry applications such as Photoshop, 1GB would be better. However, the Vision has only two RAM slots that are already filled with two 256MB chips, so you'll have to discard some memory if you wish to upgrade.

Although the Vision doesn't come with a floppy drive, memory card reader or FireWire, it is paired with a crystal-clear AG Neovo 19" monitor. The backlighting is bright and even and there was hardly any banding in our greyscale and colour transitions tests. This is the best monitor in the group and a real treat in a £600 PC. The Vision is also notable for having a one-year onsite warranty.

PERFORMANCE

The 1.8GHz Athlon 64 3000+ is the slowest processor in this group and this resulted in the worst score in our video-encoding benchmark. Overall, it scored 97 in our applications benchmarks, which puts it last but one in the group, but as the fastest PC scored only 110, this isn't too bad a result.

The Vision gave a better showing in our 3D gaming benchmarks. Equipped with an ATI Radeon X550, it scored 14.1fps in our Doom 3 test. Running at lower detail settings, the Vision would make a reasonable gaming PC but the latest games will demand a more powerful graphics card.

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