Dollarshops Budget Office-Student PC Review

Others/Miscelleneous by jmke @ 2007-10-17

AMD and Intel have been flooding the market with highly affordable hardware for the past year, manufacturers of motherboards, memory and other PC components have also brought down the overall cost, the positive outcome of this competitive behavior can be seen in our test today, a complete system for a mere €315. What do we get for this price and is it enough for the budget minded user out there? We find out.

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Performance Tests

Performance Tests

We compared the system running with three different configurations:
  • Default configuration, 3800+ @ 2400Mhz, 1Gb Ram, Onboard VGA
  • 3800+ @ 2400Mhz with 2Gb and 8600 GT VGA
  • 3800+ @ 2700Mhz with 2Gb and 8600 GT VGA


The price difference between the standard configuration (€315) and 2gb/8600GT upgrade (+€126) is approximately 40%, let’s see if that increased cost is worth it.

Let’s start of with the free benchmark suite from Futuremark, PCMark05 is system benchmark which also relies on 3D graphics for one section of the test:

Madshrimps (c)


With more system memory and dedicated VGA you get an increase of ~34%, not bad at all. Overclocking the CPU does have a large impact here as the PCMark05 test includes encoding and compression tests, up ~44% compared to stock.

Next up are two CPU sensitive benchmarks, both calculate Pi up to millions of digits:

Madshrimps (c)


Here the impact of a faster video card or more system memory is absent, only overclocking can help this test.

Time for our first 3D action:

Madshrimps (c)


The onboard VGA is good for 2D, but that’s where it ends.

Our last synthetic benchmark is the complete system benchmark from BAPCO, SYSmark 2007 Preview uses a large collection of application to measure the performance of a system when different tasks are done. The global score is your “Sysmark” but it is split up in 4 subcategories: Video Creation relies on Adobe Premiere and similar software to gauge performance, E-Learning uses flash/java, 3D modeling renders a few scenes, Office Productivity combines spreadsheets with word documents and powerpoint presentations. This benchmark is quite advanced and takes some time to compete. Dual core systems will benefit in some tests here as multi-tasking is often used.

Here’s the result with the Budget system from Dollarshops.eu

Madshrimps (c)


Multi tasking benefits from the extra memory, pure CPU bound applications like 3D rendering show less impact. Overclocking the CPU shows the biggest gain, as expected.
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Comment from Sidney @ 2007/10/17
It is good to see smaller localized businesses are taking on Dell and HP alike. Bring me back to the good old days of the early 90's when small system builders provided good service could make a living.

Let's hope manufacturers will give the small business owners a chance intead of kissing the behinds of Dell.
Comment from SuAside @ 2007/10/17
well, decent rig for the small tasks. though i do hope no one falls for it as a gamerig... Dell/HP/etc always tend to sell 'multimedia' and 'game' pcs that are more or less like this. doesnt take the buyers too long for find out it's not exactly the powerful gaming machine they were promised.

still, if it's used for normal student tasks, this rig has very good value.
Comment from jmke @ 2007/10/17
if you add the €97 VGA you do have a decent gaming rig though, not top, but decent

 

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