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PC Nextday’s Zoostorm has an attractive glossy black front panel, but the rest of the PC looks rather plain. It’s also a little noisy, so you’ll probably want to stow it under your desk out of sight anyway. A basic Genius keyboard and optical mouse are included. The mouse works well enough, but the keyboard feels too spongy to use for anything other than writing short documents and emails. The Zoostorm is equipped with a 2.5GHz Core 2 Quad Q8300 processor and 4GB of RAM which sped through our Windows application benchmarks. The Nvidia GeForce 8400GS graphics card isn’t up to playing the latest 3D games, though. At least it doesn’t share system memory as an integrated graphics chip does, however. The 8400GS is not only slow, it’s also just large enough to block the PCI Express x1 expansion slot. There are still two spare PCI slots for adding internal peripherals, though. There’s also space for adding four more internal hard disks and a second optical drive, but the motherboard has only two SATA ports, so you’ll need a SATA PCI card if you want to fill your PC with lots of internal storage. The 255W power supply will be a concern if you want to add lots of internal upgrades. You won’t need to add a memory card reader, as one is already present. The Zoostorm is already fitted with its maximum amount of RAM, 4GB. This should be enough for most tasks, but other PCs can accommodate as much as 8GB or even 16GB for especially memory-intensive applications.
PC Nextday’s Zoostorm isn’t powerful enough for gaming, but it’s quick enough for more serious work. However, its real problem is that the competition is so good and you can buy better-specified computers for the same amount of money.
