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The HEXUS world usually revolves around looking at singular PC components, such as you'd buy from your favourite online retailer when putting together a custom system. Things like graphics cards, processors, hard drives, everything needed to build a full PC for yourself.
So while we don't typically look at full PC systems at HEXUS, bar the benchmarking systems we put together for reviews, and the full boxes we create for our small form factor articles, there's been nothing stopping us doing such a thing, other than not being sent them.
It's been a long while coming, but we've finally managed to get over the hurdles an independant website needs to overcome, in order to attract big name OEM and vendor box builders to send us systems for evaluation and review.
Time Computers, whom you'll no doubt have heard of if you're a UK resident, are the first such company to step up to the plate, to let us take a look at their wares. But before we look at the specific wares they sent along, let's have a look at the company.
Time are part of the big half dozen UK vendors that dominate the online computer sales sector in this country, competing with the likes of Dell, Evesham and Mesh. Time also have a few physical stores, dotted around the UK, so you can buy their systems and products from the high street.
Now, if you've also followed the UK computer sector for longer than five minutes, you'll also know that Time aren't without their perceived problems. After the merger with Tiny in 2002, and their less than stellar reputation in terms of after sales service and support, along with the odd horror story in terms of the systems they sold, I was very keen to see what the Time of today was like.
Now, anyone with any common sense can understand that it's only the vocal minority that ever speak out against a company, and it's only when something goes wrong. Nobody says anything when stuff just works. So you can't ever take the voices of a vocal few to be indicative of the overall position a company occupies, but you can't ignore it either. Would Time send out a misconfigured horror of a box? Would they send a hand massaged box that isn't reminiscent of what the customer would buy?
All valid questions, but I'll try and cover them as we proceed, rather than answer them straight away, but it's something to seed your mind with. Review hardware is often hand chosen and setup, after all, why would you want to send out a bad product for public review?
Anyway, on to the box they sent up, their massively high specced UltraStation XP3200+.
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