Packard Bell iXtreme 9094

The iXtreme range represents the pinnacle of Packard Bell's desktop PC range and the 3GHz Pentium 4 processor is the fastest available. It uses a technology known as Hyperthreading.

This essentially makes Windows treat your PC as if it has two processors and should speed up performance when you have more than one application running at once.

Combined as it is here with 1Gb of DDR memory, a 120Gb hard disk and an ATi Radeon 9700 graphics card, it boasts a formidable specification.

Despite this, our performance tests produced very disappointing results, with P4 2.8GHz systems comfortably outperforming it. One reason for poorer performance was that Hyperthreading was switched off on our PC. However, even after enabling it, we still achieved performance far poorer than expected.

It wasn't just the speed that suffered. The graphics card is hooked up to a smart, 17in TFT display but we could not get the computer to let us set the resolution we wanted.

A smaller problem was that the motherboard doesn't support the new, faster AGP 8X standard. The 9700 series graphics cards support 8X to give their best performance so, ultimately, users won't ever squeeze the most from the graphics card while it is fitted in this computer.

Its connections look much better. There are six USB 2 ports, of which two are front mounted, and three FireWire ports with one on the front. A modem and a network adapter are also included, alongside CD-RW and DVD-Rom drives.

There are only two free PCI slots, both of which would be hard to use, thanks to the proximity of the modem and graphics cards.

There are no spare memory slots but, with such a lot of memory supplied, upgrading is unlikely to be needed in the lifetime of the computer.

Price: £1,799 (incl. VAT)
Contact: Packard Bell 01628 512456
www.packardbell.co.uk

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