Metro 860 Multimedia PC
The Xenon machine featured an Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz processor with 256MB of RD-RAM and a 40GB Seagate hard disk drive. The package includes a built-in Ethernet adaptor with 56K modem and ships with the Asus V8200 Deluxe graphics card (featuring 64MB of DDR-RAM, TV out, and TV in connectors as well as a VR glasses connector). This card alone is worth around AU$1,000.
The Xenon was assembled very nicely. It probably had the cleanest looking inside of all the machines. It was quite obvious that a lot of emphasis was placed on making sure all the wiring and cabling was out of way. Xenon uses quite a small case so it was important to make sure things like data cables and wires are tucked well away. The power supply was placed in an interesting position over the CPU. It actually works well there because it draws the hot air from the CPU. And it is attached to a sliding panel that slides the power supply out of the case to give you lots of room to access the CPU.
The Xenon ships with a Philips 107P monitor. This was one of the better monitors in this review. It uses a Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube and is capable of resolutions of 1920 x 1440. The overall picture quality was excellent and the OSD was very easy to use and included control settings like moiré and convergence adjustments which come in very handy.
Xenon uses onboard sound instead of a designated sound card. This drives a set of Creative SoundBlaster PCI128 Digital speakers, which are good games speakers. However we could only manage to get sound out of the two front speakers and not all four speakers because we didn't have a second line out port. Xenon also supplied an AOpen DVD-1240 and an AOpen CRW-1232PRO. The CD-RW drive can burn standard CDs at 12x and write on re-recordable CDs at 10x. As with most of the other machines we noticed that a couple of glitches when we started writing and closing a CD whilst watching a movie. However the glitches were not that bad and we were able to tolerate the few pauses that we experienced.
The Xenon also included a cordless mouse and keyboard (both require two AAA batteries). This worked well--both the keyboard and mouse were comfortable to use.
In our speed tests the Xenon performed well. It wasn't the fastest P4 in 2D but in 3D it was the fastest overall. It scored a little over 160 frames in Quake 3 at 1024 x 768 and a bit over 120 frames at 1280 x 1024. There seems to be a definite advantage in using an Intel-based processor and running Quake 3. OpenGL-type games have in the past run much faster on Intel machines than on AMD based machines. We found this to be the case again in this review.
Metro 860 Multimedia PC
Company: Xenon
Ph: 03 9763 2777
Price: AU$4,897
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