Monitor, bundle, warranty, value and stability
The L22WD 22in LCD monitor from V7 (VideoSeven) produced a bright, even picture with no evidence of ghosting or blurring when displaying fast-moving images at its native 1680 x 1050 widescreen resolution. Colour reproduction, however, was a little below par, with whites tinged with cream and with blacks not quite dark enough for our liking. Bear in mind that it's a budget 22in monitor that's currently available for £175. Even so, it has both DVI and HD15 inputs, which is nice.
Rounding off the bundle, PC Specialist includes a couple of high-quality input devices from Logitech - the G15 gaming keyboard and MX Revolution cordless mouse.
PC Specialist pays attention to detail by providing a DVI cable in the accessory box; the monitor ships with just an HD-15 cable. Bundled software is simply what would be provided by the retail-boxed products, meaning that you receive everything you need to get going but no extra cost has been apportioned for, say, Microsoft Works or a triple-A title highlighting the gaming nature of the system.
There's a handy little booklet that covers most of the basic troubleshooting that even a novice user can attempt, leading us nicely on to the warranty.
Warranty
As specified, the Apollo Q6600-X is backed by a one-year return-to-base warranty. Claims are made by calling a local-rate (0845) number where, if deemed appropriate, an RMA number will be allocated. PC Specialist covers the courier charges for collection and re-delivery of the machine. The company says that this is usually within five working days of the agreed collection date.
You'll be emailed once the repaired PC has left PC Specialist's premises. Should no fault be found, however, the customer will be liable for a £35 charge, covering the courier costs.
Common sense dictates that you keep the box that the system was originally shipped in - it will be needed to protect the system during transit for any warranty-related claims.
Value for money?
Taking into account the warranty and pre-built nature of the machine, does it offer reasonable value for money? We can check that by totting-up the retail cost of the constituent parts you'd need to buy to build the system yourself and compare that to the machine's £1,425 price-tag.Our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that cost of the components is around £1,250 including VAT. So, you're paying £175 for the build time, support, free delivery and the warranty. So, though DIY is cheaper, PC Specialist's asking price is, to our way of thinking, far from unreasonable.
Stability
We ran four iterations of the Prime95 torture test and concurrently looped 3DMark06 for eight hours without failure. As noted earlier, the system's fans barely sped-up during this time, although the motherboard's sensors may well be at fault, returning unrealistically low temperatures at full load.
