PLUS Inspire 6400 Duo

A budget PC, the Plus Corporation Inspire 6400 Duo is a nice collection of hardware that won't break the bank. The 19in screen, 320GB worth of storage and Intel Core 2 Duo CPU provide good functionality at an excellent price, without compromising the ability to upgrade.

Included in the box is a pair of Ozaki speakers, which are a nice bonus on top of an otherwise complete package. The large 320GB Seagate hard drive will appeal to anyone who plans to store plenty of personal media and at this price point the 19in BenQ FP-92 LCD screen is a good bonus, with most budget PCs only packaged with 17in screens. As well as the PC, LCD monitor and speakers, users also get a keyboard and mouse, so the Inspire is ready to go straight out of the box.

The E6400 Intel Core 2 Duo CPU offers a good combination of value and performance CPU. The CPU, along with the 1GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, aided this machine to score 115 in World Bench 5. This is a high score for a PC in this price range and suggests that the Inspire will be good enough for just about anyone's needs, from editing images and audio to surfing the web and working from home.

In our CDEX test, where we encode 53 minutes of WAV files to 192Kbps MP3s, the Inspire 6400 Duo took one minute and 51 seconds, a good speed for those who intend to transfer music between their MP3 player and this PC on a regular basis. This can partly be attributed to the performance of the Core 2 Duo CPU. Although the Inspire 6400 Duo is not suited to games, using only an integrated graphics chip rather than a dedicated card, a score of 5794 in 3DMark 2001 SE suggests it may play some older games. It can also be upgraded with a PCI Express card in the future.

If you get carried away with music or movies, a DVD re-writer with dual layer burning capabilities means you can rip your media to DVD in order to free up some storage. If more storage is what you require, three 3.5in hard drive bays are available in the case. There are also two slots for external 3.5in devices such as a floppy drive or media card reader and two more 5.25in bays for another two optical drives. No more IDE ports are free beyond the one used by the DVD drive, but three free SATA ports allow for extra SATA drives.