Braebo Athena desktop computer

Braebo's Athena is billed as a back-to-school PC but if you are buying it as a first computer for a youngster you may need to budget for some add-ons.

The computer itself is just that – all you get is the main unit (pictured above), with no monitor, keyboard, mouse or even any power cables.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, because people buying it as a replacement for an existing desktop computer will have all those things already and can simply swap out one ‘tower' unit for the other and be up and running.

It comes with the 64-bit edition of the Windows 7 operating system installed, so once you plug in the power cable, keyboard, mouse and a display, it's ready to go.

The computer uses an AMD Athlon II 645 processor and has 4GB of memory, a 500GB hard disk, and an optical disc drive, which will read Blu-ray film discs as well as CDs and DVDs.

Our test unit came without working sound and we had to follow instructions provided by the company's technical support people to make it work, but it tells us that the problem will be fixed in retail units.

It completed our DVD-copying test, which checks general performance, in a reasonable but not outstanding 26 minutes. That indicates that it'll be fine for office and internet tasks, and more intensive things such as video editing shouldn't pose much of a problem.

It has an ATI Radeon HD 6450 graphics card, which has 1GB of its own memory and this helped it have a very respectable performance in our gaming tests – recent games should run well with little change to detail levels.

On the front panel are two USB sockets, headphone and microphone sockets and power and reset buttons. The rear panel houses four more USB sockets, a serial port (an oddity in this day and age and not useful for very much), keyboard and mouse sockets and full sound outputs and inputs for surround sound.

The graphics card has VGA, DVI and HDMI sockets so it can easily connect to any kind of monitor, TV or projector. Also attached to the back panel is a wireless network aerial, which protrudes slightly. That's unusual in a desktop computer, but can be quite useful. It also connects to wired networks.

Inside the short, squat case (it's 35cm tall) are free drive bays should you wish to add an extra hard disk or optical drive, and two free memory slots for future expansion. The computer was a little loud because of the internal fans, but it wasn't too bad.

In addition to Windows, the Athena comes with the Microsoft Office Starter edition, which includes cut-down word processor and spreadsheet applications, and Avast Antivirus.

The latter is freely downloadable and users need to register to make use of it but it's good that it's provided here so the computer is fully protected from the start.

Braebo also provides an online backup service called Livedrive, which offers a generous 500GB of space for the lifetime of the computer. This is an excellent inclusion – such services normally cost around £50 a year.

There's a one-year return-to-base warranty. The Braebo Athena offers a good amount of power for a very decent price, and if you're in the market for a replacement desktop computer, for students or otherwise, it should fit the bill nicely.