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From the outside, we were quite taken with the Medion Akoya P7321 D PC. Although its glossy black plastic looks a little cheap close up, it’s plain front and angled design means it looks quite nice.
We like the way that the optical drive, memory card reader and front USB ports are all hidden behind spring-operated flaps. They feel well made and keep the front of the computer looking neat. A nice little extra is the hot-swap drive bay, which you can use to house a regular 3¼in hard disk; it’s good for backups, as you can remove the drive when you’re done and store it somewhere safe.
Opening up the side of the case we noticed that the computer was built in a slightly strange way: the motherboard has been fitted upside down on the opposite wall of the case as normal. This means you have to remove the right-hand side panel to access the insides rather than the usual left-hand side. It makes little difference in practical use, but it’s a bit odd.
Better is the fact that there’s a 2.8GHz Core i5-2300 processor, which is the latest Sandy Bridge model. It’s a touch slower than the i5-2500 used in our reference PC, but it’s still very quick with a score of 86 in our benchmarks. It’s helped along by a massive 6GB of RAM, all of which can be used thanks to the 64-bit version of Windows. If you want to upgrade further, you’ll have to replace the existing memory as there are just two slots (one with a 4GB DIMM and one with a 2GB DIMM).
Graphics performance wasn’t as good, though. The AMD Radeon HD 5450 is a low-profile card designed more for Media Center use than gaming. Our Dirt3 and Crysis 2 benchmarks both failed at our default settings. However, turning down detail settings to Low, we managed a frame rate of 32.94fps at 1,280×720; for light gaming, then, this PC will just about do the job. You can upgrade the graphics card if you want, but the power supply has no PCI-E power connectors and its 350W limit means it won’t handle the most powerful cards. Still, one benefit of this card is that it has a passive cooler. As there’s just the processor fan inside, the PC is remarkably quiet and won’t cause a distraction, even in a very quiet room.
We were pleased to see a 1.5TB hard disk, as this gives you plenty of room for all of your files. Should you want more storage space, there’s the aforementioned hot-swap drive bay, plus two USB3 ports for external devices (there’s a further six USB ports as well).
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Medion provides a wireless keyboard and mouse in the box. They keyboard’s fairly comfortable to type on, although we wish it had more feedback, as it’s easy to miss hitting a key causing errors in typing. We have no complaints about the mouse, which is a basic ambidextrous model with a scroll-wheel in the middle.
The Akoya P7321 D is certainly a fast computer with a lot of RAM and storage, but we’d rather have less RAM and a better graphics card for this price. As it stands, it’s a decent quiet computer, but you can buy the Dell Vostro 260 MT for a lot less. This PC has a smaller hard disk, but is faster in Windows, making it the better buy.
