Carrera Vision CS 04 review

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Verdict:

The Vision's case and motherboard are great, but its performance in Windows is a little tame. It's a good choice for gamers with an eye to future upgrades, but otherwise PC Nextday's Zoostorm is a better buy

Review Date: 22 May 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Seth Barton

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Carrera's PC has a great case and some good components. Unfortunately, it's outdone by the excellent PC Nextday Zoostorm.

FEATURES

Carrera's Coolermaster case is undoubtedly the best in the group. The black grilled front looks good and provides lots of ventilation, and a 120mm fan creates excellent airflow. Despite a passively cooled graphics card, though, the large case fan, a motherboard fan and a noisy power supply make the PC fairly loud.

Inside there are 10 drive bays, all with convenient sliders that lock the drives in place. A decent-sized 200GB hard disk and a floppy drive are provided, but there's no card reader. The ECS KN1 SLI Lite motherboard comes with all the slots you'll ever need for expansion. It's one of two SLI motherboards in the group, so you can even add a second graphics card.

The motherboard also provides plenty of ports, including eight USB2 ports and Gigabit Ethernet. The integrated sound processor offers 7.1 surround-sound outputs and a coaxial S/PDIF digital output.

PERFORMANCE

With only 512MB of RAM and a 2.0GHz AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor, this PC lags behind most of the group in Windows tasks. It came seventh in our application benchmarks with a score of 95. It's more than capable of everyday tasks such as word processing or web browsing, but there are much faster PCs in the group.

Fortunately, its Nvidia GeForce 7600GS graphics card is fairly powerful. This PC came third in our Doom 3 test, producing 33.1fps, and managed an impressive 18.5fps in Call of Duty 2. It's a good choice for gaming, but not quite as powerful as Gladiator's Kronos PC.

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