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Palicomp Carbon AMD TFT-19 review

Palicomp Carbon AMD TFT-19
Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £425
inc VAT

The Carbon's expansion potential and quality primary components make this a Budget Buy.

Specifications

3.1GHz AMD Athlon II X4 630, 4.000000 RAM, 19in 1,440×900 display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

http://www.palicomp.co.uk

Palicomp is a new company to Expert Reviews, and the Carbon is the the second of the company’s PCs we’ve looked at. The first was the Ice Blast 750OC-22, which we were very impressed with.

Palicomp has impressed us again with the choice of components and the system’s power. Most budget computers come with a dual-core processor, but Palicomp has fitted a more powerful AMD Athlon II X4 630 processor. This usually runs at a clock speed of 2.8GHz, but it’s been overclocked to 3GHz, giving the system a slight performance boost, while the stock AMD cooler remains good enough to keep the CPU cool.

With 4GB of RAM fitted, this PC did well in our benchmarks, with an overall score of 88: very close to that of our reference Phenom system. In this computer’s case, its score was helped by decent performance in our video editing test, which uses all four processor cores.

It’s no surprise that there’s no dedicated graphics card. Instead, graphics are provided by the motherboard’s onboard Nvidia 8200 chip. This only managed 4fps in our Call of Duty 4 test, which shows that you can’t play games on this computer. However, the graphics chip will decode HD video, so if you add a Blu-ray drive later, you’ll be able to watch the films with ease. There’s a PCI-E x16 slot free, so should you want to upgrade to a dedicated graphics card, you’ll find this easy to do.

The 19in BenQ G900W monitor has a resolution of 1,440×900, which is slightly higher than the more common 1,366×768. This extra doesn’t make a huge amount of difference in day-to-day use, although we found the Windows desktop had plenty of space on it. The matt finish means you get few reflections from lights, although lower contrast than with a glossy display. That said, the picture quality from this display is very good.

There are acres of space inside the case, with room for more hard disks, memory and expansion cards. The cabling is bundled but not particularly tidy, and some cables have been tied so that they block a hard drive slot. A heatsink on the motherboard may block some PCI cards, but with three free slots you shouldn’t have any problems, and there are two free PCI-E x1 slots in any case.

Oddly, the PC we tested came configured with the wrong suspend mode set in the BIOS, so entering Sleep mode kept the system fans spinning and the PC drew 49W of power. Adjusting the mode to S3 fixed this and the PC drew only 4W in Sleep mode afterwards.

The Carbon has no eSATA or FireWire ports, but Palicomp has fitted an extra two USB ports at the rear, and a generous 500GB hard disk should handle your storage needs for some time. There’s no memory card reader, and no digital audio output, but at least there’s a full set of 7.1 surround sound outputs.

A more comfortable keyboard will probably be your first upgrade, as the cheap, unbranded model that comes in the box has incredibly spongy keys we’ve come across so far, with no feedback. The half-height Enter key is annoying, and the large set of shortcut keys, that let you launch programs, control multimedia and other common tasks, aren’t arranged in intuitive groups.

We were impressed by the Carbon’s expansion potential and the choice of quality primary components, including the case, processor and monitor. It’s a Budget Buy.

Basic Specifications

Rating *****
Processor AMD Athlon II X4 630
Processor external bus 220MHz (2.2GHz HyperTransport)
Processor multiplier x14
Processor clock speed 3.1GHz
Processor socket AM2+
Level 1 cache 4x 128KB
Level 2 cache 4x 512KB
Memory 4.000000
Memory type DDR2
Maximum memory 16GB
Motherboard ASRock K10N78
Motherboard chipset Nvidia GeForce 8200

Ports

USB2 ports (front/rear) 2/8
Firewire ports (front/rear) 0/0
eSATA ports (front/rear) 0/0
Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Wireless networking support N/A
Other ports N/A

Internal Expansion

Case midi tower
PCI-E x1 slots (free) 2 (2)
PCI-E x16 slots (free) 1 (1)
Free Serial ATA ports 4
Free memory slots 2
Free 3.5in drive bays 4

Hard Disk

Hard disk model(s) Seagate Barracuda (ST3500320NS)
Interface SATA 300
Total storage capacity 500GB
Spindle speed 7,200rpm

Graphics

Graphics card(s) Nvidia GeForce 8200
Graphics/video ports VGA, DVI

Sound

Sound Realtek High Definition Audio
Sound outputs 7.1 line out, stereo line out, mic in
Speakers none

Removable Drives

3.5in floppy drive no
Supported memory cards none
Optical drive model Optiarc AD-241S
Optical drive type(s) DVD+/-RW +/-DL

Display

Viewable size 19 in
Screen model BenQ G900WD
Native resolution 1,440×900
Response time 5ms
Screen inputs DVI, VGA

Other Hardware

Modem No
Keyboard generic wired keyboard
Mouse HiPoint 3D Optical Mouse

Software

Software included Nero Burning ROM 9
Operating system Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Operating system restore option Windows disc

Buying Information

Warranty one year RTB
Price £425
Supplier http://www.palicomp.co.uk
Details www.palicomp.co.uk

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