Computer Planet ND 3000 review

The Computer Planet ND3000 is available as a basic system and with a couple of upgrades. Considering it doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card, the basic system we started with is rather expensive, at £734.

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The case is a fairly sturdy and well-finished Cooler Master chassis with seven 3 1/2in bays and three 5 1/4in bays. One of each is occupied, by a 1TB hard disk and a DVD-RW drive, and one of the 3 1/2in bays is externally facing so you could fit a memory card reader. At the top of the front panel, you’ll find a USB3 port, a USB port and mic and headphone ports.

At the back, the motherboard provides an array of ports including two USB and two USB3 ports, a PS/2 port for a mouse or keyboard, Gigabit Ethernet and six 3.5mm stereo ports for analogue surround sound. If you opt not to buy the dedicated graphics card and want to rely on the processor’s integrated graphics, you’ll be able to use two of the motherboard’s DVI, HDMI and VGA outputs to connect a couple of monitors.

The Gigabyte B85M-D3H motherboard is unusual for a socket LGA1150 board in that it only has four SATA3 ports, although these are bolstered by an additional two SATA2 ports. There are four memory slots, two of which are occupied by 4GB modules running at 1,333MHz. There’s less room for expansion cards than you’ll see on many motherboards, with just two PCI and two PCI-E x16 slots. There are no PCI-E x1 slots and one of the PCI slots will be blocked if the optional graphics card is installed.

The PC’s Intel Core i5-4570 processor is a little less powerful than the i5-4670K processors we see in a lot of PCs at this price, and it doesn’t have an unlocked multiplier so can’t be easily overclocked, but its overall score of 102 in our benchmark tests shows it is still more than powerful enough to run demanding applications.

The main upgrade you can add to the system is a £140 Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 graphics card with two DVI outputs, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort. It’s a fairly competent gaming card with 2GB of graphics memory, and managed a frame rate of 50.9fps in Dirt Showdown at Ultra quality and a resolution of 1,920×1,080. When running Crysis 2 at the same settings we saw a slightly jerky 26fps, but lowering the game to Extreme quality meant that we got a smooth 45.4fps. If you’re planning on playing games you should definitely get this upgrade, as the processor’s integrated graphics can only manage a properly playable frame rate of 32.3fps in Dirt Showdown at a resolution of 1,280×720 and High quality.

For £117, Computer Planet will supply a 23in AOC E2343Fi monitor with HDMI and VGA inputs. This has an unusually chunky stand which includes a 32-pin iPod dock, so you can play video straight from an iPod or iPhone on the screen. If you want to dock a newer iPhone or iPod with a Thunderbolt connector, you’ll need an adaptor. The matt display looks slightly dull and cold, and it didn’t do well in our colour calibration tests, either; we saw a contrast ratio of 158:1, and the monitor could only cover 77% of the sRGB colour gamut.

The monitor adds an extra £118 to the price of the system. It’s not terribly expensive, but it’s not very good, either. You can also add a standard, serviceable Logitech keyboard and mouse set for £18.

Computer Planet provides a one year collect and return warranty covering both parts and labour, and another two years’ return to base warranty covering parts only. The system also comes with full copies of PowerDVD 10, Nero 12 and Webroot Anti Virus 2013. It’s worth noting that Webroot’s detection engine didn’t do well in our last group test, so you may want to consider an alternative to make sure you’re protected.

Although it has a reasonably powerful base configuration, we found the Computer Planet ND3000’s motherboard to be limited in its upgrade potential and we weren’t impressed with the PC’s monitor upgrade. Rivals such as the award-winning Chillblast Fusion Kestrel or Palicomp Sniper Elite2 Gamer have better base configurations and more flexible upgrade paths.