Computer Planet GX-A7700 review

On the case’s attractively understated front panel, you’ll find two USB3 ports and the usual 3.5mm microphone and headphone ports. There are another two USB3 ports at the back, four standard USB ports and a PS/2 port. There are analogue and optical S/PDIF audio ports, as well as HDMI, DVI and VGA display outputs.

The GX-A7700 is available without a monitor, keyboard and mouse for £677, but pay more for our review specification and you’ll also get a 24in Packard Bell Viseo 243D display, Logitech Z313 speakers and a Logitech MK120 keyboard and mouse set. The matt display is big and bright, without the annoying reflectivity of glossy monitors. We measured a good contrast ratio of 963:1, and black levels of 0.29cd/m2. It didn’t do quite as well in our colour coverage test, as our calibrator stated it was showing 87.1 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. Even so, the monitor’s good enough for standard desktop tasks, gaming and watching videos. The monitor has DVI and VGA ports.

The Logitech speakers that come with the PC are a fairly generic 2.1 set, so they’re good enough for general gaming and online videos, but are pretty awful for music. They are conspicuously boomy without much treble or midrange detail, but they’ll do if you don’t have anything better. The Logitech keyboard and mouse are unremarkable but do their job.

The GX-A7700 is a carefully designed and well-built PC. It performed well enough in our application benchmarks and it comes with a decent monitor. It is, however, very expensive compared to comparably specified PCs sold elsewhere. The 2TB hard disk and 120GB SSD are great features, but at £671 this PC is £20 more than the Best Buy-winning and Core i5-based Palicomp Haswell i5 Commander, which has a powerful dedicated graphics card. Without a dedicated graphics card, this PC is too expensive to recommend.