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Mesh’s Nero 9850HD is one of the best £500 PCs here thanks to some great hardware and excellent upgrade potential. It did astonishingly well in most of our benchmark tests and was particularly effective at video transcoding and in our multitasking Productivity test, where it outclassed most of the £650 and £800 PCs. This is thanks to the great combination of AMD’s quad-core Phenom X4 9850 processor, an Asus M2N68-VM motherboard and 4GB of RAM. The M2N68-VM can take up to 8GB of RAM and supports AMD’s new Phenom II processors, which gives it plenty of scope for future upgrades. Its onboard graphics processor is HD ready, so you’ll be able to play high-definition movies if you install a Blu-ray drive. It has an HDMI output as well as the usual DVI and VGA ports. Noise from the tough mini tower case is an inoffensive low-frequency hum. The Nero 9850HD has by far the best – and biggest – monitor in the £500 group: a 22in widescreen Iiyama ProLite E2208HDS. With a native resolution of 1,920×1,080, this monitor is ideal if you want to play games or watch or edit HD movies. Image quality is great with even backlighting, although colours are a little undersaturated and it isn’t the brightest 22in display we’ve seen. The system’s only weak area is that it lacks a dedicated graphics card. This means you’ll need to spend extra to buy a PCI Express graphics card if you want to play 3D games. The integrated graphics caused the Nero to come bottom of the entire group in the PCMark Vantage Memories test.
If you added a Molex-to-PCI-E power adaptor and a decent graphics card, such as Sapphire’s £84 Radeon HD 4830 the Nero 9850HD could easily outperform many of the £650 and £800 PCs here. If you’ve no interest in gaming, the high-resolution monitor makes this a great multimedia and home entertainment PC. If you want to play games without upgrading, Eclipse’s Matrix i74n96GS is a better choice.
