Review: PC Specialist Trident s500

It doesn’t have any particularly outstanding features, but the Trident s500 performs well in most of our benchmark tests.

The 2.8GHz Pentium D provides plenty of raw processor power, and its dual-core design means that it will be good at juggling more than one application at a time (some of these low-cost PCs are still using older, single-core processors).

It has 1GB of Ram as well, which will improve performance for demanding tasks and also be welcome if you’re planning an upgrade to Vista.

The Radeon X550 graphics card can’t rival the performance of the more powerful Radeon X1600 offered by the top-performing Watford machine, but it still produced a respectable 30 frames per second in our Far Cry tests, which is enough to cope with the occasional bout of 3D gaming action.

There’s a media card reader on the front of the machine for transferring photos from a digital camera. However, the lack of a Firewire port for connecting a DV camcorder is disappointing – as is the modest 80GB hard disk. Anyone keen on multimedia-heavy tasks may soon run out of disk space.

We were also a little puzzled by the inclusion of both a floppy disk drive and dial-up modem. Obviously some people might find a use for these – after all, not everyone has broadband yet – but we’d happily swap both of them for a single Firewire port or another 20GB of hard disk space.

There’s no separate set of speakers, either, so you have to use the small speakers built into the 17in TFT monitor. However, that’s a common feature with these low-cost PCs, and not a deal-breaking weakness. It’s a shame about the 80GB hard disk, though, as the Trident is otherwise a solidly built low-cost PC that provides good all-round performance.

This article is part of a group test of bargain PCs.
Other articles are:
Ambros Shuttle SS31T
Evesham Axis STR Plus
Mesh D820 Value +
PC Nextday Zoostorm 1-3301 Versatile PC
Watford Aries Performa 3500+RV
Is the desktop PC dead?
Graphs and table of features can be read via our Pdf downloads.