Carrera Octan 64/6800

You won't see many PC systems under £1,000 that include a 19in TFT as standard, particularly a screen such as the excellent Sharp LL191. With a street price of around £480, it's not cheap. But, as high-quality monitors don't guarantee an impressive system performance, we were keen to see how Carrera justified the rest of the Octan's £938 price tag.

It uses the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ and a Sysmark 2004 result of 156 shows the PC is no speed demon. However, given that it's backed by 512MB of Ram, we don't think many users would complain about its performance.

The 128MB Geforce 6800 LE graphics card returned a 3Dmark03 score of 6,808, which may concern gamers. A 120GB 7,200rpm hard drive takes care of storage, while optical drives come in the form of a Sony eight-speed dual-format DVD writer and a standard CD-RW drive.

Carrera seems confident that the Octan 64/6800 Special will stand the test of time and has included a five-year warranty. The first three years of this are on-site, and the final two are return to base on a labour-only basis.

With decent, but not amazing performance, the selling point of this system is the 19in Sharp monitor. However, if you're thinking of buying this PC, it's important to note that most 19in TFTs have the same maximum resolution of 1,280 x 1,024 as 17in models. So while the size of the display is slightly bigger, you won't be able to fit any more information on the screen.

Contact: Carrera 0871 222 3456
www.carrera.co.uk

Specifications
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ - 512MB Ram - 120GB hard disk - Sony DVD-RW - Nvidia Geforce 6800 LE 128MB - 19in Sharp LL191 TFT - 5.1 surround sound speakers - Windows XP Home - Microsoft Works 7.0

Performance: ***
Features: ****
Value For Money: ****
Overall: ****