Advent 3987BTO

One of the strengths of the Advent brand is that most models are available off the shelf in every PC World store. This particular model, however, is built to order, hence the BTO suffix.

If you decide to buy the 3987BTO, you sign the order and take the monitor home with you, then a week or two later the rest of the PC turns up on your doorstep.

This is a little unusual, but it means that this Advent is competing head-to-head with PCs from other vendors such as Hi-Grade and Dell.

Most of the new Advent models have a very styled look, dressed in shades of blue and various metallic hues. The 3987BTO, on the other hand, is a very regular beige box.

Inside you get a microATX Intel D845PT motherboard, which seems odd as there's plenty of room for a full ATX board. This houses a 2.4GHz Northwood Pentium 4 processor which is coupled with 512Mb of DDR SDRam.

Northwood processors use Intel's 0.13micron technology, have 512Mb of Level 2 cache and run on a 4 x 100MHz front-side bus.

This is clearly the highest clock speed we have ever seen, hence our interest in its performance in the Sysmark 2002 test.

Sadly, the benchmark failed to complete even one run. However, this should not be considered a flaw in the chip itself. We only had the system for a very short space of time, so we could not rectify any problem we may have encountered during the benchmarking procedure. Look out for more on the 2.4GHz chip next month.

Graphics test scores are very good, though. In particular, the 3987BTO achieved 8,587 in 3Dmark 2001. This is one of the highest scores we've ever seen; we'd expect nothing less from this Pentium 4/Geforce4 4600 combination.

Couple this with Creative's Audigy sound card and you have a very impressive on-paper specification.

This is just as well, as you have practically no potential to upgrade the PC without removing one component and replacing it with another. The microATX motherboard is at the root of this problem; in all honesty, it comes across as no more than a cost-cutting measure.

In its defence, Advent has built a fully specified PC and, as a result, there are very few other cards you may want to plug in. However, both a network card or TV tuner are legitimate upgrades, and your choice is clearly restricted by the absence of a few PCI slots.

It has only three PCI slots, and two of these are used by the Audigy sound card and the Lucent Winmodem. That leaves one available PCI slot next to the Geforce4 4600 card in the AGP slot.

We feel that the slot is best left empty to allow cooling air to circulate around the graphics card, leaving you with no practical internal upgrade option.

However, the motherboard is a decent enough product as microATX models go, and is supplied with more than enough memory to handle even the most arduous of applications.

Another saving grace is that it has four USB ports, rather than the traditional two, but they're all on the back of the PC and we prefer the convenience of front-mounted USB ports.

Advent has included a Maxtor Diamond Max hard drive with the latest UltraDMA133 interface, running at 7,200rpm. It has a nominal 80Gb capacity, which translates to 74.5Gb using NTFS under Windows XP Home Edition, which is enough for most vendors.

Naturally you get a DVDRom and CD-RW too, and both are of reasonable quality and specification, at 16- and 24-speed respectively.

The Creative DTT 2200 speakers are adequate but fairly basic. Similarly, the Samsung Syncmaster 957DF 19in monitor is a good budget model.

The snag is that this isn't a budget PC, so we expected more. The software package is also limited to Microsoft Works Suite 2002.

In the end, the 3987BTO is a well-specified, fast PC, but falls down with its one-year warranty, poor upgrade potential and high price.

Price: £1,799 (£1,531 ex VAT)

Contact: Advent 08705 464 464
www.adventcomputers.co.uk