Medion Akoya P5315 D

This Medion desktop is an Aldi special, available in the supermarket's shops from Sunday February 6. It's a squat ‘tower' case that should easily fit under most desks, and being what's called a ‘base unit' it comes with keyboard and mouse but not a monitor.

Like all recent Medion desktop computers we have seen, the top of the case has a moulded fitting for a special Medion external hard disk, which is available separately. However, standard USB hard disks are so widely available that the moulded fitting is not much of an advantage.

The main processor inside the computer is an AMD Athlon II X4 640 quad-core chip, one of the fastest currently available. It's combined with 4GB of memory and an ATI Radeon HD 6450 graphics card with 512MB of its own memory. Together those components provide a powerful base for all kinds of computing tasks including simple web browsing, editing high-definition video and playing recent games at high-quality levels. Our DVD-copying test is a realistic representation of raw computing power and this computer chewed through it fairly easily, though only about half as quickly as the latest Intel processors we've reviewed.

A 1TB (1,000GB) main hard disk is more than enough for storage of all but the largest collections of documents, pictures, music and video, and there is a DVD drive mounted in the front panel that will read and create all CDs and DVDs, but not the more recent Blu-ray movie discs.

Also on the front panel there is a spare bay so you can add a Blu-ray drive if you wish, a memory card reader, headphone and microphone sockets and two USB ports. Four more USB 2 and USB 3 ports are mounted on the rear panel along with surround sound and optical sound connections and keyboard and mouse sockets. It can connect to both wired and wireless networks. The graphics card has DVI, VGA and HDMI sockets for attaching it to any kind of monitor or flat-panel television set.

It's supplied with Windows 7 Home Premium and some decent software such as Office 2010 Starter, a word processor and spreadsheet combination. It also comes with Cyberlink programs for playing and working with DVDs and Corel Draw Essentials 4 for drawing and painting. Some of the other software isn't so useful: the free Google Chrome browser is fine, but the trial anti-virus program is of little use, and neither are the links to Aldi services. Fortunately these can be removed easily. The supplied keyboard and mouse are fine but not especially comfortable.

We have seen quicker processors more recently (see above) but given the price tag on this model and its combination of impressive processor, graphics card and memory, it's excellent value.