Medion Titanium MD XL

Forget the January sales. This is one year when you can go out and buy that Christmas PC early and still make a killing on the price, because Aldi is offering this superb Medion base unit for just £749.

You will have to be quick though, as the PC went on sale on Thursday 28 November and there's limited stock.

The last time Aldi offered this sort of deal, many buyers were left disappointed but this time Aldi promises that all customers who turn up on the day can order one for delivery if there are no computers available from stock.

Despite looking rather cheap and flimsy from the front, a peek behind the sliding panel at the front of the machine reveals one of the best-connected PCs we have ever seen.

The ConnectXL, as Medion calls it, contains a massive range of connectors.

The most unusual option is support for five memory card types - SD, MMC, Memory Stick, Compact Flash and Smart Media. For those with MP3 players and digital cameras, this is the computer for you.

Medion doesn't stop there. There are three USB ports, one FireWire, composite video-input, headphone and audio connectors, all provided in the same front panel.

In a normal day's work, you should never have to bother scrambling round the back of the PC to plug in a peripheral.

Add to this the dual-USB, FireWire connections and TV card at the rear of the machine and you have a very well-connected computer.

The DVD-Rom drive, hidden behind another panel, lets you play the latest movies, while the CD-RW provides useful, removable storage, which is very important as the Medion lacks a floppy disk drive. However, there is a free drive bay so if you're handy with a screwdriver you can fit one at a later date.

Build quality inside is a whole lot better, with a single, super-silent fan providing cooling for the components, especially the fast 2.6GHz Pentium 4 processor.

This will let you run the most demanding of applications.

Our systems tests showed it performed well, although we'd have liked to see the vacant memory slot used to double the 256MB of memory for even better performance.

Graphics are provided by an nVidia Geforce Ti 4200 card. While this is not top of the range, it's good enough to power through most games on the market at the moment.

With an on-board network card and a modem on the TV card, you are left with two PCI slots for upgrades at a later date.

The Titanium MD XL comes with a massive 120GB hard disk, which is loaded with plenty of good software.

There are packages for music-making, CD-recording and DVD dabbling, kept company by the excellent Microsoft Works Suite 2002.

For the price, this is an amazing PC with plenty of features. The only things to count against it are a couple of build quality issues and a little less memory than we'd like.

DETAILS

Contact: Aldi 0870 513 4262