Last month, Pacstar and Altech stormed onto the A-List with their incredibly powerful and good-value Core 2 systems. The former was mid-range and both this month’s PCs are competing with it. First up is a perennial favourite, Trinity International (TI), who hasn’t sent us a bad PC yet. Its first Core 2 system, the Core 2 Dual Extreme got off to a flyer in our benchmarks.
It wasn’t long ago that we marvelled at the power of our Pentium D reference PC and the Dual Extreme wiped the floor with it. A 2D-benchmark score of 1.30 is a massive 30 percent faster – astonishing for a mid-range PC. It’s also some 20 percent faster than Pacstar’s DuoElite 2006 although that system was hamstrung by a dodgy RAID controller, which has since been fixed by a motherboard upgrade. TI achieved this by using a 2.13GHz Core 2 E6400 processor, a generous 2GB of RAM and two Seagate 320GB 7200.10 hard disks (with 16MB buffers) running in RAID 0 (giving a massive 640GB of storage). It’s a fast and responsive setup.
3D performance is limited by the 19-inch LCD’s 1280 x 1024 native resolution but the 7900 GT graphics card is a good choice. In our medium tests it averaged 44.6fps in Call of Duty 2 and 65 fps in Far Cry. It will play all the latest games, with full details, for some time yet. And games looked good on the BenQ LCD. The 8ms response time meant lag was minimal and colour reproduction was also good. But we do prefer its peers’ widescreen formats.
The Microsoft keyboard and mouse are certainly improvements over Pacstar’s offerings – both are comfortable and responsive and we were very happy with the Logitech X230 2.1 speakers which delivered a massive punch and great volume before distorting. There’s still room for upgrades including three 5.25in drive bays and two more hard disks. There’s also room for a second floppy. Inside there are three spare PCI slots, and a 1x PCI-E slot. At the back 7.1 audio is catered for and coaxial and optical S/PDIF out ports appear too. In addition to this are four USB 2 ports, parallel and serial ports. FireWire is, disappointingly, missing. At the front, on the side, are two USB 2 ports and two audio jacks.
The system has an audible whir, but nothing too distracting. TI includes Windows XP Home and a two year RTB warranty. Although we liked the widescreen LCD and thumping graphics of the DuoElite, the Dual Extreme is hardly deficient in this area. It also offers superior 2D performance, hard disk space, input devices, some kick-arse speakers and a superior warranty and as such, it edges on to the A-List.
