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PC Nextday’s Zoostorm 64-4303 is one of only two PCs in this entire Labs to come with a set of 5.1 surround-sound speakers. You’ll need to position the Edifier M1550 speakers carefully for the best sound and they don’t have as much bass as we’d like, but they’re useful for watching movies and playing games. The 64-4303 is one of the fastest £650 PCs for gaming, thanks to its Nvidia GeForce 9800GT graphics card. It produced over 40fps in Call of Duty 4, but you’ll need to adjust the graphics settings for smooth gameplay in Crysis at the monitor’s native resolution. Like PC Specialist’s Apollo Q830 GT, the Zoostorm 64-4303 has a Core 2 Quad Q8300 processor and 4GB of RAM. It fared well in our tests, but the £650 Eclipse and Mesh PCs were faster with their Phenom II processors. You can’t add any more memory, but 4GB should be more than enough for a while. You’d need to upgrade to 64-bit Windows to use the entire 4GB anyway, as the pre-installed 32-bit version can only access 3.5GB at most. The Zoostorm 64-4303 has fewer spare expansion slots and internal storage bays than some PCs here, but it should be sufficient for most people. There are five empty 3?in bays, but just one spare 5?in drive bay. There are two PCI slots and one PCI Express x1 slot, but the graphics card blocks access to the x1 slot. We weren’t expecting to see the best-quality monitors included with PCs at this price, but we were nevertheless disappointed with the AMW display. It may be large at 22in, and the glossy finish might make images look vibrant, but the backlight is uneven, so parts of the screen look darker than others. Thanks to relatively narrow viewing angles, the colour accuracy suffers even more if you’re not looking at it square on.
Apart from the quality of the monitor, this is a good PC. It even comes with an onsite warranty, which is convenient if any hardware should fail. Mesh’s 920 Nero is narrowly the better deal, but the Zoostorm 64-4303 is a good choice (along with the Eclipse) for games.
