Microland has produced a well-styled system with black and silver livery throughout. The look goes right through to the Logitech keyboard and wireless mouse, which keep things neat and tidy on the desktop. It's just as good-looking inside, too.

This is another system based around an Athlon XP 2500+ processor, again with 512MB of memory and a 120GB hard drive. Like the CCL PC, it also includes an NEC DVD rewriter but, also like that system, no secondary CD or DVD drive to help with back-up copies. It does have a good set of connection sockets, though, with two 9-pin serial ports, eight USB 2 ones and two FireWire. You should be able to connect virtually anything to this PC.

Graphics output comes from a PowerColor Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card, using a fairly high-end graphics processor from ATI's range. Even so, we only saw 3DMark scores of 9,147 and 2,553; not as high as we would have expected. The TECH IT 02.01 runs a 17-inch Samsung SyncMaster 753DFX monitor, which gives a clean, precise picture, with little of the shadow-mask patterns that show on some other budget devices.

None of the systems in this group runs from a separate sound card, but with the quality of recent system board chipsets, this isn't a problem. The Realtek ALC655 chip used here is a full 5.1-channel device and, unusually at this price point, drives a full 5.1 set of Creative Inspire P580 speakers. These speakers are great for DVD movie soundtracks, though we still found a lack of mid-range breadth in music reproduction.

Under test, there were sporadic faults on the system, ranging from it hanging while running benchmarks, to refusing to restart correctly without being powered down. From our experience with other Microland systems, this is likely to be an isolated case, but it could indicate something not quite right in the configuration.

Microland provides no application software with the TECH IT 02.01, but does include the usual utilities for controlling the DVD drive. Given its high-end graphics card, we expected better performance and there's still a question mark over the system hangs we experienced.

Company: Watford Electronics

Contact: 0870 027 0900

Company: CCL

Contact: 01274 471266

Company: JAL

Contact: 01782 848100

Company: NetHighStreet

Contact: 0870 777 5252

Company: Microland

Contact: 0870 443 0399

Company: Carrera

Contact: 0871 222 3456

Tags: dvd ieee 1394 interface universal serial bus compact disc hardware dvd±r storage ethernet