PC Nextday Zoostorm 7-7401 Downloader PC review

The vast collections of music, photos and videos that most people have on their PCs mean that storage can run out pretty quickly.

With High Definition (HD) content around the corner, this problem is going to get worse. Thankfully, PC Nextday's Zoostorm 7-7401 Downloader PC means you can wave goodbye to your storage woes, as it comes with a massive 1.2TB (around 1,200GB) of storage space.

The Downloader has four 320GB hard disks joined together as a RAID 0 array. This provides a gargantuan amount of storage capacity and increases performance, but if just one disk fails, you'll lose all your data. You can choose to use RAID 1, 5 or 10 for greater redundancy, at the expense of storage space if you wish. We'd recommend using RAID 5, as it has excellent performance and can tolerate one drive failure in the array without losing all your data. You'll still have 960GB of storage, too; see Upgrade Workshop next month for details about RAID.

Although the Downloader's large case and steady hum aren't suited to most living rooms, you can record your favourite TV shows using the digital TV tuner, Windows XP Media Center and remote. The single TV tuner means you can't record one show while watching another, but you can plug another tuner into one of the seven USB ports or two PCI Express x1 slots.

PC Nextday hasn't skimped on the rest of the Downloader's specification and it did well in our performance benchmarks. With a generous 2GB of RAM and a dual-core Pentium D 940 processor, it made short work of our video-encoding and multitasking tests. The Downloader should be able to handle most software with ease for the near future.

There's no SLI support, but the single GeForce 7600GT graphics card still did well in our 3D graphics tests, managing a smooth 48.2fps in our Doom 3 test and a more sedate but still playable 24.2fps in Call of Duty 2. Other PCs at this price will have more powerful graphics cards, but won't have as much storage space. The Downloader will be able to play today's games smoothly at high detail settings, although you will have to upgrade to a more powerful card sooner rather than later if you want to play games smoothly in the future.

The 19" AOC monitor produces a bright and sharp image, but there was some banding in our colour and greyscale tests, which isn't ideal if you edit a lot of images. A memory card reader, Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi mean that the Downloader is easy to connect to a network. It's a shame, though, that there's no floppy drive and we were surprised by the lack of FireWire. These could be added cheaply, though.

The Genius gaming mouse feels responsive, although it was set too fast for general Windows use and precise work such as image editing. The Genius keyboard feels responsive and comfortable, although the curved ergonomic layout won't be to everyone's taste.

The 5.1 Philips MMS460 surround-sound speakers are loud and more than suitable for gaming or watching movies, although the harsh treble isn't so good for music.

PC Nextday's Downloader is a generously specified PC. We wish there was another TV tuner, and dedicated gamers will want a beefier graphics card. But with its fast Windows performance and spacious RAID array, it is a versatile PC for anyone with a large media collection.