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PC Specialist’s Apollo Q830 GT may have a quad-core processor, but we can’t help feeling disappointed by the specification. Extras such a TV tuner card and a memory card reader are a nice bonus, but they’re neither expensive nor difficult to add to a PC after you’ve bought it. They certainly don’t make up for a fairly poor set of benchmark results. The Apollo Q830GT was outperformed by several of the £500 systems in our memory-intensive image manipulation tests and also our games benchmarks. The culprit is the pedestrian Nvidia GeForce 9400 GT graphics card, which couldn’t even manage 10fps in Call of Duty 4. The company appears to have made this compromise to bundle a decent monitor – a 22in Edge10 W223. It’s bright and looks good from most angles, although its reproduction of dark tones isn’t as clear as that of the 20in Iiyama that comes with Mesh’s Matrix II 920 Nero. This is down to poorer contrast. The Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 processor is very capable when it comes to optimised, multithreaded applications such as video processing, but it simply lacks the speed and power of the AMD Phenom II X4 920 processors in the £650 Mesh and Eclipse PCs. What’s more, its relatively slow clock speed of 2.5GHz means that it doesn’t perform as well as faster dual-core processors for non-optimised tasks.
Performance in our video transcoding and decoding tests was good, so with its TV tuner, large monitor and HDMI output this PC could serve well as a media centre. PC Specialist’s choice of case isn’t a bad one – the side panel has a quick-release mechanism, so no screwdriver is needed – but it was fairly average in terms of fan noise. Free delivery and a year’s internet security subscription are nice bonuses, but they don’t stop this PC looking bad when compared with the faster systems that are available for the same price. The collect-and-return warranty goes some way to redeeming the shortfall, but ultimately there are better PC bundles here.
