PC Nextday Zoostorm 62-2213 review

PC Nextday’s Zoostorm 62-2213 has a tough mini tower case which, like Mesh’s Nero 9850HD, has only enough room for a microATX motherboard.

The case is deeper than it is tall, so there should be enough room for long expansion cards. Poor positioning of the hard disk and some badly routed cables will make it a little difficult to fit a longer graphics card, though. The PC was fairly quiet, but it comes with only a single 80mm case fan.

The Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 processor is one of the fastest here and a strong rival to the AMD Phenom X4 9850 in the Mesh Nero. It also has a large 500GB hard disk and a good quality mid-range graphics card in the form of a 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT with two DVI outputs. PC Nextday includes an AMW X1910WDS 19in widescreen monitor, which has decent image quality, but slightly muted colours and annoying adjustment controls.

The Zoostorm 62-2213’s gaming performance was respectable, with a frame rate of 36.6fps in Call of Duty 4 at 1,440×900. While this was the fastest Call of Duty 4 score in the £500 group, the 62-2213’s performance was only average across all our tests.

Upgrade potential is limited as this PC is already equipped with its maximum 4GB of RAM in two memory slots. This is already more than the 32-bit version of Windows Vista can use, though. There’s room for up to five more 3?in drives but only two unused SATA connectors. Both PCI slots are free and unimpeded, but the only PCI-E x1 slot is blocked by the graphics card. There are three 3.5mm audio ports, which you can use for either 5.1 surround sound or line in and a microphone, but not both at the same time.

The Zoostorm 62-2213 has limited upgrade potential and its performance in our PCMark benchmarks was unremarkable. The onsite warranty is a bonus, but if you want a fast gaming machine, buy Eclipse’s Matrix i74n96GS instead. If you want a powerful system that’s easy to upgrade, buy Mesh’s Nero 9850HD.