Watford PowerXS 6442 review

Gallery

Verdict:

The PowerXS is cheaper than most of the other PCs in this group, but the extra money would have been well spent on more RAM to improve the sluggish Windows performance. With slightly underpowered graphics as well, this is not a good gaming PC.

Review Date: 30 Jun 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Alan Lu

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The PowerXS 6442 has a couple of noteworthy features but its performance is outclassed by other PCs in this group.

FEATURES

The PowerXS is the only PC in this group to include a widescreen monitor. The ViewSonic VA1912W has a native resolution of 1,440x900 pixels so it's ideal for watching DVDs or working on two documents side by side. At the moment only a few games can take advantage of a widescreen display, but this should change over the next year. It's not a good screen for editing photographs, as we spotted banding in darker areas of our greyscale transition test and colour accuracy suffers at certain viewing angles.

The Creative P5800 5.1 surround-sound speakers are fine for watching DVDs and playing games, but music lovers might be annoyed by the slight distortion at higher volumes.

PERFORMANCE

Like the Cube247 Perseus, the PowerXS uses a dual-core 3GHz Pentium D 930 processor. Unfortunately, it's the only PC here with less than 1GB of RAM. Having 512MB of memory to share between two processor cores means it performed badly in our image-editing and multi-application benchmarks. As a result, its overall score of 123 is the lowest in the group.

The GeForce 7600GT graphics card produced a just-playable 22.7fps in our Call of Duty 2 test. Turning down the detail settings or adding more RAM can give smoother frame rates, but the 7600GT is Nvidia's mid-range graphics card. To play the latest games at the highest resolutions and detail settings, you must upgrade the graphics card or add a second 7600GT using the spare SLI graphics slot.

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