Fujitsu Esprimo E5646 review

While home desktop PCs can usually be as big and power-hungry as they like, a different set of priorities applies to computers designed for the business market. Fujitsu’s Esprimo E5646 is a prime example of this. It’s small, measuring just 10x330x375mm. That’s somewhere between the size of a mini PC and an old-fashioned desktop. Fujitsu has actually used a desktop case, rather than the now-ubiquitous tower design, and it’s sturdy enough to put your monitor on if you need to save desk space.

Another priority for businesses is power consumption. The E5646 uses no measurable power when in sleep mode and just 54W when idle on the desktop. A final concern, which only affects some businesses, is that of approved suppliers. If you’re subject to a company policy that says you can only buy your hardware and matching support contracts from – for example – Dell, Lenovo or Fujitsu, your options are more limited.

If, however, you’re sourcing business-grade hardware for your home office or small business, there are definite disadvantages to business PCs of this sort. The E5646 is horrendously underpowered for its £750 price. The processor – a six-core AMD Phenom II X6 1035T – is lodged firmly at the bottom of AMD’s hexacore processor range, with a clock speed of just 2.6GHz. This is visible in our benchmark test results, with an overall score of just 105. That would be fine if this was a £500 PC with a bundled monitor, but most £750 PCs are far more powerful and have many more features.

The E5646 comes with a 4GB of RAM and a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional to take full advantage of it. There’s room to expand that to a maximum of 16GB of memory and it also has a 1TB hard disk, plus room for one more. There are two PCI-E x16 slots – which you can use for any PCI-E card – and two PCI slots, but the case is only big enough to take low-profile expansion cards. The integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 is good enough display your awe-inspiring presentation video in Full HD, but if you want to kill some time, it’s strictly casual gaming with this graphics processor.

There are just two USB ports on the front and another six at the back. You can connect a monitor via either DVI or DisplayPort and there’s a serial port, just in case you ever need one, which you probably won’t. Finally, there’s a pair of PS/2 ports. You can use one of these to connect the supplied Fujitsu keyboard, which is actually rather pleasant to use. It feels slightly spongy but the positioning of the flat keys was conducive to fast, comfortable typing. The USB optical mouse is small, basic and does the job.

Even if you’re equipping a small or home office, there’s nothing that makes this PC worth buying instead of a good consumer desktop like the OP3 Mars, which without a monitor costs around half the price.