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Ginger 6’s G6 Apollo 2300 is a complete Sandy Bridge system with a few more multimedia features than most. The most immediately obvious are 8GB of RAM and a Blu-ray rewriter, which could be useful if you’re interested in editing your own videos and burning them to Blu-ray.
If you’re not a budding Robert Rodriguez, there’s a less to draw the eye. The case is a compact but rather nondescript black box. It doesn’t have many ventilation gaps, but there’s no sound or dust proofing either. However, the stock Intel cooler and single case fan don’t make a huge amount of noise. The case’s interior is bare metal, but the edges are rolled to keep you from cutting yourself. It’s not particularly big, but there’s not much in it either. Just one of the PC’s four internal 3 1/2in drive bays is occupied, while both externally facing 3 1/2in bays are empty. There are just two 5 1/4in bays, of which one is taken up by the BD-RE drive.
The Nvidia GeForce GT 430 graphics card is tiny and its performance is a minimal improvement on the integrated graphical capabilities of recent Intel Core processors. It produced frame rates of just 14.3fps in Call of Duty 4, 6.4fps in Crysis and 5.5fps in STALKER. Needless to say, you won’t be doing much 3D gaming with this PC. The only significant advantage the graphics card has over the Asus P8H67-M LX motherboard’s integrated graphics is its HDMI output.
If you decide to upgrade, you’ll also want to invest in some Molex to PCI-E converters. The 500W power supply can provide enough juice for a modestly powerful graphics card, but lacks the relevant plugs. One of the motherboard’s PCI slots is blocked by the graphics card. There’s a second PCI slot and a PCI-E x4 slot, but that’s it as far as your upgrade potential goes. There are only two memory slots, which can handle a maximum 16GB of RAM, but the existing 8GB of RAM means you won’t have much need to upgrade. There are two occupied SATA III ports and four vacant SATA II ports, which are fast enough unless you need to fit some SSDs.
There are just two USB ports at the front and another six at the back – hardly generous by current standards. There aren’t any FireWire or eSATA ports and there are just three 3.5mm stereo outputs. The PC comes with a pair of Creative A40 stereo speakers, which are good enough for system sounds but somehow manage to sound simultaneously tinny and muddy when confronted by complex musical tracks. The supplied BenQ G2222HDS monitor is a good one, though. As well as a Full HD resolution of 1,920×1,080, it has even backlighting and natural looking colour.
For video editing and production, the great monitor, 8GB of RAM and Blu-ray writer will all appeal to enthusiasts. There’s a lot here for the money then, but let’s be clear that sacrifices have been made, in 3D graphics particularly, to fit it all in. For a more balanced all-rounder, we prefer the Chillblast Fusion Aurora, even though its monitor isn’t as good.
