Medion Akoya X7371 D review

It’s obvious that Medion has scrimped and saved on every possible bit of the Akoya X7371 D’s hardware to leave enough in the budget for the insanely powerful Intel Core i7-870 processor. The case is the most obvious victim. It looks okay on the surface but inside we found a distressing number of poorly finished metal edges. We didn’t cut ourselves, but got a couple of nasty scrapes. The only good thing is a pair of front-loading 3.5in drive caddies, which allow you to remove or hot-swap two hard disks easily.

The unbranded power supply also looks cheap, but it’s hard to tell, as there nothing except a part number written on it. It spawns a tangled mass of cables which then feed the Molex-to-SATA adaptors that power most of the X7371’s drives. We were no more impressed with the motherboard – a Medion own-brand affair with just four SATA ports. All of them are occupied but only two are actually in use, and the remaining pair is connected to the SATA disk caddies.

Memory slots are similarly thin on the ground – there are two, each occupied by a 1,333MHz DIMM of DDR3 RAM and able to take up to 3GB apiece. You’ll have to buy a 64-bit version of Windows if you want to upgrade your RAM, though, as the X7371 only comes with Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit.

There’s not much else on the motherboard. There are no PCI slots and only one of the two PCI-E x1 slots will be accessible if you upgrade to a graphics card with an active cooler on it. Currently, the single PCI-E x16 slot is occupied by a weedy ATI Radeon HD 5450. It’s necessary, as the motherboard doesn’t have any video outputs, but you can forget about 3D gaming. The graphics card is fine for displaying your desktop, watching a HD movie or playing casual games like Plants vs Zombies, if that’s all you really want to do with your Core i7 PC.

There are only a handful of other features. There’s a memory card reader on the front, Gigabit Ethernet, eight USB ports – six on the back, two at the front – and a pair of PS/2 ports for a keyboard and mouse. Medion has supplied a basic but functional wired PS/2 keyboard and USB mouse. There are enough 3.5mm audio outputs to connect a 5.1 speaker system while still having a mic and headphones plugged in to the front panel audio connections.

As you’d expect, the i7-870 packs plenty of processing power, gaining an overall score of 146 in our benchmark tests. However, we’ve seen comparable scores from overclocked Core i5 PCs such as the Eclipse Solar i76r557. The graphics card isn’t up to any modern 3D games and the PC has minimal upgrade potential. Everything has been pared to the bone to release a Core i7 system for £700, but it’s produced a PC that we really wouldn’t want.