Medion Akoya X7371 D review

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.