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Today's PCs are so blisteringly fast that there are only really two tasks that push them to their limits: video editing and gaming. Of these two, it's gaming that really forces the PC to flex its muscles.
The Vision Gamer Pro, as its name suggests, is aimed at those who love a frantic bout of action in 3D shoot 'em ups such as Quake III and Serious Sam.
The machine certainly packs a heavy punch, thanks to the muscular Geforce 4Ti 4200 graphics card and Athlon XP 2100+ processor at its core.
As with any gaming machine, the monitor is the window on the gaming world and here the NEC/Mitsubishi 19in D Plus 92 deserves special mention. It's as flat as a pancake and has a great image.
Today's games can take up a huge amount of hard disk space so we were happy to see a large 80Gb IBM Deskstar nestled inside. There is also 512Mb of DDR memory to keep Windows XP Home from constantly moving data to and from the drive. Other storage needs are taken care of by a Samsung DVD-Rom drive and a Mitsumi CD-RW drive.
Instead of adding a sound card, Multivision has opted to use the motherboard's onboard sound chip. This isn't usually a great idea, but the sound chip is actually rather good in this instance, as is the 5.1 Logitech ZXR-500 speaker set.
Connectivity is taken care of by a 56K modem and onboard network adapter.
There's also an abundance of USB ports because, alongside the two standard USB ports, Multivision has fitted an additional four high-speed USB2 ports. This goes some way towards making up for the lack of FireWire support.
There are two game controllers included but neither is top class. The Thrustmaster Fox 2 Joystick is a tad old-fashioned as it connects to the game port rather than the USB port, while the 12-button USB Thrustmaster digital-only gamepad isn't a great deal of use in these days of more responsive analogue controllers.
The six bundled games are enough to get you started, along with a copy of Microsoft Works Suite 2002.
There were a couple of niggles worth mentioning and, although neither are particularly serious, the first may cause some consternation for new users.
On the system we reviewed, the hard disk activity light cable wasn't properly connected to the motherboard, which meant there was no green blinking light when the hard disk was used.
Second, while this PC is unusual in having four IDE channels (allowing up to eight internal drives to be connected), Multivision still opted to connect both the DVD-Rom and CD-RW drives to the same channel when better disc-to-disc copying could be had by putting each drive on its own channel.
Overall though, we were impressed with the Vision Gamer Pro. While it is not the best all-round package on the market, it's not designed to be. If you are a gamer and not interested in office tasks or video editing then it's a solid choice.
Price: £1,213
Contact: Multivision 0870 220 2822
www.multivision.co.uk
Also consider: NEC Powermate I-Select XL4 A2000
See also:
The Matrix features the new AMD XP 2600+ chip, with excellent results. 25 Nov 2002
If you're in the market for a new PC, look no further than this. 13 Aug 2002
The Matrix is a powerful and appealing PC aimed at the serious gamer. 28 Jun 2002All Desktops
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