Advent T9504

One look at the Advent T9504's imposing Coolermaster chassis was enough to convince us that this isn't your average PC.

This was mostly thanks to the Coolermaster Musketeer front panel that features displays to monitor voltage, CPU temperature and even internal sound pressure.

Below the panel sits a card reader, AV sockets and USB and Firewire ports. There's a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 640 processor, which uses 64bit extensions, making it an ideal accompaniment to Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

The T9504 ships with Windows XP Home Edition, but its CPU is still capable of running 32-bit applications faster than an ordinary 3.2GHz Pentium 4.

Advent has installed four PC3200 Dimms for a total of 2GB of Ram and uses a single 256MB Geforce 6800 GT graphics card. This offers fairly impressive performance, as proven by the 53.5fps (frames per second) Doom 3 benchmark result.

The Samsung Syncmaster 913N TFT performs well, but has a native resolution of 1,280 x 1,024. Serious gamers will prefer a 20in display with a native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200, but they won't appreciate the ball mouse. Shipping a new PC without an optical or laser mouse is daft, especially with a gaming system.

Other features include a digital TV tuner and two 250GB hard disks. The T9504 looks great, performs well and offers good value.