Office and internet browsing rig.

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
For the benefit of anyone looking to buy a slightly lower price custom build than is often reviewed here, I will give my thoughts on the spec we just received. Take my thoughts as you find them, I obviously post a bit here but that does not mean I would hold back any criticism if warranted. Believe me!

We needed a machine to replace my mothers poorly performing laptop, I decided to get a custom build machine to get something that I knew would last the distance. This is the lowest cost machine we have bought from PCS (3 total) and it was treated with as much care as the £1,000+ laptop ordered last year. The cable management inside is immaculate with the connectors still easily accessible in the (unlikely in this case) event we want to upgrade anything. The chassis is cheap but gets the job done, however I wouldn't recommend it for anything more than an office machine.

You get all the usual updates on the way through the building process, culminating with a 1 hour delivery window text/email from DPD. In this case the machine was as close as makes no difference bang on the earliest time predicted.

Setup was a breeze, about 10-15 minutes after the knock at the door I had the first windows updates downloading. In this case the welcome pack was fairly bare, but having low end components that is to be expected. Normally you would receive all the spare parts in this, thing like SATA cables, stickers, SLI bridges or any other stuff that comes with your components but is not used in the build, which is very handy for upgrading later. Also in the welcome pack is your manual, windows CD and any DVD burning software that comes with your drives.

Now the only down side of my order... I ordered the 120Gb v300 SSD from Kingston, which in itself is not a problem. The problem, which I had heard mumblings of just before placing the order, is with the v300 itself. In an effort to control costs Kingston have switched to cheaper flash memory resulting in a very significant performance drop off. I am not really bothered about it because it was the v300 or a 500Gb caviar black, the SSD is still faster, my mother doesn't need 500GB of storage and the SSD is also silent, so it was a fairly easy decision for me. I'm only really including this as a warning to anyone reading that the v300 is to be avoided and this has nothing to do with PCS at all really. The v300 is more than 50% slower on the headline performance numbers (sequential read/write) than advertised. The Kingston hyperX 3k is £10 more and does perform as stated, get that one.



Case
STYLISH PIANO BLACK ENIGMA CASE + 2 FRONT USB
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i3 Dual Core Processor i3-4130 (3.40GHz) 3MB Cache
Motherboard
ASUS® H81M-PLUS: Micro-ATX, LG1150, USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs
Memory (RAM)
4GB KINGSTON DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 4GB)
Graphics Card
INTEGRATED GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR (GPU)
1st Hard Disk
120GB KINGSTON V300 SSD, SATA 6 Gb (450MB/R, 450MB/W)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Power Supply
CORSAIR 350W VS SERIES™ VS-350 POWER SUPPLY
Processor Cooling
INTEL STANDARD CPU COOLER
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
WIRELESS 802.11N 300Mbps PCI-E CARD (£16)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 4 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Operating System
Genuine Windows 8.1 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£79)
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365
Anti-Virus
BULLGUARD INTERNET SECURITY - FREE 90 DAY TRIAL
Warranty
3 Year Standard Warranty (1 Month Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 11 to 13 working days
Quantity
1

Price: £425.00 including VAT and delivery.

Any questions just ask, I'm not used to writing reviews so I bet some of you are thinking "but he forgot to mention ..."



 
Last edited:

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
Why didnt you pay £5 extra and get the Silver Warranty?

Because I love to live life dangerously. That and I'm fairly confident I could fix just about anything that broke on it. The silver warranty just extends the collect and return service, I would just get PCS to send me the component and pay the postage if necessary.

I would highly recommend the silver warranty to anyone not altogether confident inside a PC though. But as I said I like to live life on the edge :p [(and im also Scottish so a bit tight)yes im allowed to say that because im Scottish nobody else is]

Where are the pictures?

Do we really need pictures? I mean it literally has a CPU cooler, 1 stick of RAM and a wireless card....
 
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