PC Specialist Apollo V7300 review

Like other systems from PC Specialist, the Apollo V7300 is available as a preset configuration but can be customised via the website, where you can build just about any specification you want.

Thanks to the snazzy black and silver Trident chassis, this is a striking machine, its mesh front providing a welcome change. Rather than using screws, the case has a set of simple clips to pop the side off, with the hard drive and DVD writer held in place by easily removed plastic bolts, which takes the pain out of upgrading later.

PC Specialist have put a lot of effor into ensuring the Apollo V7300’s components are kept cool. There are dual 120mm exhaust fans mounted at the rear of the chassis, and a funnel to channel hot air from the processor cooler through holes in the side of the case. The PC is accompanied by a Hanns G HW191D monitor, the highest quality display supplied with any of the PCs here, supporting both DVI and analogue D-Sub inputs at the same 1440×900 resolution as the HW191A.

The rest of the specification is perfectly respectable, but nothing really stands out. The Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 processor is absolutely fine for most day-to-day use, although far from the fastest CPU on the market. This is the same chip used in the best PC in this group, but in the PC Specialist its performance in Windows Vista is held back by the relatively meagre 2GB of system memory (RAM). Nevertheless, the 2D benchmark scores proved the Apollo V7300 will easily handle most computing tasks.

In our 3D test, the frame rates it managed were noticeably less impressive than some of the other PCs here. The 512MB Radeon HD3650 card is the oldest discrete graphics card in the group, and although it packs a bit more punch than the 9300GS in the Medion, it pales in comparison with the other GPUs. That’s not to say the PC Specialist is incapable of gaming, but if that’s one of the main things you want to do with a PC, this machine isn’t the best choice.

In lesser company the Apollo V7300 would look like a very decent PC for this price, but it’s outshone by the excellent systems on test.