The Voyager took a different approach from the competition by going for raw power at the expense of the supporting components. Unfortunately a couple of wrong component decisions stop the Voyager 600 from running away with it.

First Impressions

At Last! Two boxes that actually say where they're from! As ever the monitor box was obvious enough but the system unit actually came in a box specifically designed for transporting the system with the Big Red Logo on the outside.

Inside the box was a users manual, which although looking a little long in the teeth, points you in the right direction for setting the system up. Again, there are no port labels for the back of the computer so thankfully it's quite straightforward what goes where.

Features

Big Red have gone all out by supplying a AMD Athlon 600 based system. This is still a premium processor although with the way higher clock speed CPUs are being released recently......

With the processor forming a large part of the budget for any PC, obviously the Voyager has had to cut down in other areas. The hard drive is an older model IBM 16.8Gb 5400rpm drive which doesn't support UDMA/66 although the motherboard, again based on the Gigabyte 17X, does have UDMA/66 controllers. Strangely enough the UDMA/66 cable that Big Red supply with the machine has had the end connector cut off. Although this makes the cable shorter and easy to keep tidy, it is my understanding (feel free to correct me on this) that a UDMA/66 cable should have three connectors with the Blue being plugged in to motherboard, which it is, the other end being plugged into the primary device and the middle being plugged into the secondary device. We did try an uncut cable in the system and it didn't seem to make any difference but then again the hard drive isn't running in UDMA/66 mode. Time to get our pipes and slippers out and all discuss it properly perhaps?

The soundcard is the SoundBlaster 128 backed up by another pair of clone speakers. Whilst it's still a more than capable card, the SoundBlaster 128 just can't compete with the likes of the 1024 player in the other two machines.

The other main place Big Red have made savings is my only supplying 64Mg of Memory instead of the 128Mg present in the other two systems. The debate of whether the trade off is worth it will now commence, but remember - the benchmarks never lie!

Oh, and one final place Big Red have made a saving on our machine is by not actually supplying us a Windows 98 Manual and CD with the system, although I sure that this is an oversight.

Ergonomics

The Big Red case is the only tool free one here - simply unclip the front panel and the cover can be removed. The looks of the case are something you'll either love or hate. Opinions were divided here although I thought it was nicely designed and quite good looking and because I'm the only one with any taste round here so what I say goes; the case is OK!

Inside the case is all tidy with things being kept out of the way. There is that strange issue over the UDMA/66 cable but some attention has been shown to keeping everything serviceable. The only other concerning thing inside the case is that the CPU got uncomfortably hot, especially after the system had been on for about 48 hours non-stop. The heatsink and fan on it seemed to be quite a basic affair as apposed to the twin fan effort on the Protek machine that kept everything stone cold. It is not fair to say that the CPU was overheating but performance must have been impaired and there was a hint of system instability.

The mouse is a Taiwanese clone that looks like its just come out of the crusher. Not up to the standard of the other Microsoft mice but it is actually quite usable once you get used to it. The keyboard is equally unexciting but functional.

The monitor is the worst of those here being an AOC 17" with a 0.28mm dot pitch. The image quality was still acceptable but the features on it were very basic with it being one of their entry-level models.

Performance

This was to be the real test as to whether the CPU was worth compromising the other aspects of the system, especially dropping from 128mg to 64mg. As it turned out the results were tainted by an unforeseen aspect - the IBM Hard Drive. Usually IBM drives are about as good as you can get when it comes to performance and especially reliability, but perhaps we'd got a duff one or it had seen one re-install too many, the transfer rate was about half what it should have been. I can't help feeling that that cut cable came into it somewhere but I was unable to prove it. It's disappointing the drive wasn't a UDMA/66 model because then I think the system would have flown. Out of curiosity, we tried swapping the 64mg for a 128Mg module to see what difference that would make. The results brought it up with the Protek machine, which is still disappointing considering the difference in CPU, but I think the hard drive was to blame.

We had problems running the 3D Mark benchmark on the system, not usually a problem with TNT2 based cards although we hadn't tried it before with one based on their most basic chipset, the Vanta. We did manage to get an unofficial result of 1690, which is well off the running for the other two machines.

Final Analysis

The Voyager 600 is a nice machine but has just made too many compromises to get that Athlon 600 in the system. With a different hard drive and more memory the Voyager 600 probably would have left the opposition for dust. There is, however, still the fact of the poor monitor, speakers, sound card, blah, blah .........you get the idea.

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