Palicomp Carbon AMD TFT-19 review

Palicomp is a new company to Expert Reviews, and the Carbon is the the second of the company’s PCs we’ve looked at. The first was the Ice Blast 750OC-22, which we were very impressed with.

Palicomp has impressed us again with the choice of components and the system’s power. Most budget computers come with a dual-core processor, but Palicomp has fitted a more powerful AMD Athlon II X4 630 processor. This usually runs at a clock speed of 2.8GHz, but it’s been overclocked to 3GHz, giving the system a slight performance boost, while the stock AMD cooler remains good enough to keep the CPU cool.

With 4GB of RAM fitted, this PC did well in our benchmarks, with an overall score of 88: very close to that of our reference Phenom system. In this computer’s case, its score was helped by decent performance in our video editing test, which uses all four processor cores.

It’s no surprise that there’s no dedicated graphics card. Instead, graphics are provided by the motherboard’s onboard Nvidia 8200 chip. This only managed 4fps in our Call of Duty 4 test, which shows that you can’t play games on this computer. However, the graphics chip will decode HD video, so if you add a Blu-ray drive later, you’ll be able to watch the films with ease. There’s a PCI-E x16 slot free, so should you want to upgrade to a dedicated graphics card, you’ll find this easy to do.

The 19in BenQ G900W monitor has a resolution of 1,440×900, which is slightly higher than the more common 1,366×768. This extra doesn’t make a huge amount of difference in day-to-day use, although we found the Windows desktop had plenty of space on it. The matt finish means you get few reflections from lights, although lower contrast than with a glossy display. That said, the picture quality from this display is very good.

There are acres of space inside the case, with room for more hard disks, memory and expansion cards. The cabling is bundled but not particularly tidy, and some cables have been tied so that they block a hard drive slot. A heatsink on the motherboard may block some PCI cards, but with three free slots you shouldn’t have any problems, and there are two free PCI-E x1 slots in any case.

Oddly, the PC we tested came configured with the wrong suspend mode set in the BIOS, so entering Sleep mode kept the system fans spinning and the PC drew 49W of power. Adjusting the mode to S3 fixed this and the PC drew only 4W in Sleep mode afterwards.

The Carbon has no eSATA or FireWire ports, but Palicomp has fitted an extra two USB ports at the rear, and a generous 500GB hard disk should handle your storage needs for some time. There’s no memory card reader, and no digital audio output, but at least there’s a full set of 7.1 surround sound outputs.

A more comfortable keyboard will probably be your first upgrade, as the cheap, unbranded model that comes in the box has incredibly spongy keys we’ve come across so far, with no feedback. The half-height Enter key is annoying, and the large set of shortcut keys, that let you launch programs, control multimedia and other common tasks, aren’t arranged in intuitive groups.

We were impressed by the Carbon’s expansion potential and the choice of quality primary components, including the case, processor and monitor. It’s a Budget Buy.