Last month Excel impressed us by offering Windows Vista and a dual-core AMD processor with its value PC. But this month Pacstar manages to squeeze in a Core 2 Duo processor and not the budget E4200 model (which supports a Front Side Bus speed of 800MHz) either. It’s a 1.86GHz E6300 which supports a Front Side Bus (FSB) of 1066MHz. This is flanked by 1GB of RAM and a 320GB Seagate hard disk which together generated a score of 1.22 in our benchmarks. To be 22 percent faster than a very fast consumer system from last year, while coming in substantially less than two grand, is fantastic.
Pacstar has also sensibly plumped for a Radeon X1950 Pro graphics card. This is our alternate A-List choice for performance graphics cards, as it will play all games comfortably at 1280 x 1024. Indeed, it averaged 57fps in our medium-settings (1280 x 1024), Far Cry with HDR test and 32fps in Call of Duty 2. We also like the use of a Gigabyte card with a quiet Zalman cooling unit.
A stock cooling unit is used on the processor, but unlike its noisy big brother, the lower-powered E6300 doesn’t require it to get loud. The system as a whole just makes a quiet, unobtrusive hum.
The case has room for three more 5.25in drives to keep the excellent Lite-On 18x DVD writer (which also supports dual-layer and DVD-RAM writing) company. There’s room for one 3.5in external drive too. Inside you can add three more hard disks, two 1x PCI-Express card and three PCI cards. At the back are six USB 2 ports, three audio jacks for 5.1 audio and serial and parallel ports. FireWire is unfortunately missing, though. The usual two USB 2 ports and audio jacks adorn the front.
The widescreen 19in LCD comes from Chimei. The 2ms response time meant we saw practically no lag. Colour reproduction remained good and our only slight concern was that movies could look a little grainy. It’s not the most attractive monitor, but size and performance at this price mean it’s impressive. The keyboard and mouse match the Eragon – they’re adequate, wired, low-end Microsoft models.
The warranty is only 1yr RTB and the price includes either XP Home or Vista Basic editions. But at this price, we can’t complain. There’s more power available than many people will ever need, yet it remains quiet and very affordable. We have no hesitations about putting it on the A-List as our value PC of choice.
