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Arbico’s CD7400 XL has a good specification for its price, with an Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 processor, a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics card and a 500GB hard disk. The compact Cooler Master midi tower case has excellent noise dampening. The fans were barely audible, even though one is built into the side panel. It’s one of the most solidly constructed cases here, with plenty of room for extra components, although the blue lights on the front panel won’t be to everyone’s taste. The CD7400 XL’s Radeon HD 4670 graphics card is among the fastest in the £500 group. At our standard test resolution of 1,440×900 it achieved a playable frame rate of 31.3fps in Call of Duty 4, and 15.2fps in Crysis at 1,680×1,050 with High quality settings and 4xAA. The card has HDMI, DVI and the brand new DisplayPort connection, but only a handful of DisplayPort monitors are available so far. The included 19in Hannspree XM-S New York monitor uses the DVI interface. It has a resolution of 1,400×900, and image quality is reasonably good. Colours are vivid, but it has a general pink tint that shows up on pale images. The CD7400 XL didn’t fare too well in our PCMark Vantage tests: its Overall score of just 4,268 was the slowest in this group. This is still more than fast enough for most office and general Windows tasks, though. Another niggle is that the onboard sound card has only three mini-jack outputs. This means you can’t connect a 5.1 speaker set if you also want to use a microphone, as two of the jacks have a dual function. The two-year warranty is a little misleading too, as it doesn’t cover the cost of any replacement parts in the second year – just the labour to fit them.
Although this isn’t a bad PC – and it draws the least power of the six £500 PCs – it’s rather unremarkable when compared with the competition. If gaming is your primary interest, it’s a decent budget choice, if not quite as fast as Eclipse’s Matrix i74n96GS. Mesh’s Nero 9850HD is much better value if gaming is of no interest, though.
