NEC PowerMate ML450 review

NEC tends to focus on the business market, so we haven't seen a lot of the company's PCs. The PowerMate ML450 is firmly aimed at consumers, though, and is available at a good price.

Underneath the PowerMate's well-built black and silver case is a dual-core Pentium D 930 processor paired with a generous 2GB of RAM. As expected, it performed well in our benchmarks, scoring highly in our video-editing and multitasking tests. The PowerMate should be powerful enough to handle most computing tasks with ease. Gamers will be disappointed, though. As our Doom 3 and Call of Duty 2 benchmarks show, the underpowered Radeon X1300 graphics card isn't suitable for playing the latest games, although older, less graphically demanding titles will be playable. You can replace it with a more powerful PCI Express graphics card.

The 17" LCD monitor produces rich and vibrant colours, although the image was grainy, whites were dingy and there was some banding in our greyscale transitions test. Although a 19" monitor would have the same 1,280x1,024 resolution, we'd still expect to see one with a PC at this price, as the larger image is easier on the eye. The monitor has a captive D-sub cable, an odd choice as the graphics card has only a DVI port, although an adaptor is provided in the box.

We had to fiddle with the monitor's controls to get the best image. You'll have to rely on the monitor's built-in speakers, as an external set is not provided. Although these are not as tinny as expected, you'll need to add an external set for listening to anything other than Windows' alert sounds. You can buy a set of 5.1 speakers, as the PC has onboard support.

The PowerMate is equipped with two 200GB hard disks. The second hard disk is useful for making backups of your data, but you can't configure them as a RAID array without adding a RAID controller to the empty PCI slot. This is disappointing, as we would expect most PCs at this price to support RAID.

The mini-tower case isn't bursting with internal expansion options. As well as the empty PCI slot, there's a PCI-E x1 slot, a spare 51/4" bay for another optical drive and a 31/2" bay for another hard disk or a floppy drive. The six USB2 ports and three FireWire 400 ports are plentiful enough and a memory card reader is built in.

If you don't play games, the PowerMate ML450 is a powerful PC with plenty of RAM and hard disk space. But for the same price, you'll find better-value PCs with DVI-equipped 19" monitors, more powerful graphics cards and RAID support.