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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.

Outside&Inside Look

Outside & Inside look

The Casetek V.Pandora is not a high end model, but does offer a few nice features for the price; Dollarshops does not include any case fans by default, but there is room to fit a 120mm in the front and one in the back.

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The excess cable wiring was tucked away nicely to keep the airflow path clear inside, as you see in the photo below, the motherboard is not full size ATX, this small board does limit your upgrade options. The Jetway board has only 2x SATA connectors and 1x PATA, you have 2x DDR2 slots, one x16 PCIe slot and 2 PCI slots.

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The AM2 processors is installed with the default AMD aluminium heatsink; The PSU model is a Sirtec rated at only 310W, seeing as this is a low end budget system we weren’t expecting much higher;

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The DVD Writer is fitted behind the front hidden 5.25” bays, two of them are provided, pushing the button spits out the DVD tray smoothly. Overall the case is of ok quality, while it’s clear that this is a budget case, we did not find any extremely sharp edges or signs of weak construction.

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Connection wise the AM2 motherboard offers support for PS/2 mouse and keyboard, LPT port for older printer, COM1 serial port , 4 USB ports, onboard 10/100 network and line-in/line-out/microphone jack. In the photos above you also saw another 2 extra USB ports at the front of the case (these are hooked up) and also front panel audio (mic/headphones)

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Time to power on ->

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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