Scan Value G31 review

If you’d like to upgrade the storage, there’s plenty of room inside the PC. You get two free 5 1/4in drive bays and six free 3 1/2in bays, and there are three free SATA2 ports for your storage. SATA2’s quick enough for normal hard disks but not SSDs. There are two spare USB headers to add another four USB ports using backplates, and a couple of free memory slots. The dedicated sound card consumes one of the two spare PCI slots, but there are also a couple of free PCI Express x1 slots and a spare PCI Express x16 slot, which can also take PCI Express x1 and x4 cards.

Scan hasn’t skimped on the PC’s peripherals, either. The Logitech MK120 bundle is a perfectly acceptable wired keyboard and mouse set, and we’re fans of the AOC i2352Vh monitor. This is a 23in IPS panel with a 1,920×1,080 resolution, and has both impressive colour accuracy and wide viewing angles. Out of the box, our Dispcalgui calibration software reported slightly too much green in the picture, but this was easily fixed and once calibrated the monitor came within 97.2% of the sRGB colour gamut.

Scan’s Value G31 is a classy PC with a great-looking case and high-quality components. It’s also quick in desktop tasks and has reasonable gaming performance and a useful dedicated sound card. It’s just pipped to the post among the Windows 8 PCs we’ve seen by the Palicomp Alpha Blade thanks to that PC’s faster graphics and 2TB of storage. However, the Palicomp PC doesn’t have such a classy case and has a slightly inferior monitor, so if games aren’t so important to you the Value G31’s a great buy.