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Protek Ultra "Oy, Mate! Want a cheap PC, know what I mean, nudge, nudge, wink, wink? To you £50, 'cos I like you". Heard something like that before, probably from an unsavoury type character we all know and love down the pub? Well, it could well be that his days are numbered with the launch of a product that may well make us all stop and think about the way we buy PCs. What am I on about? Protek have launched a PC, albeit without a monitor or Operating System, for £49.99. Whilst it isn't exactly based on a PIII 800, who cares? You've always wanted that second machine for the kids to play about with or to get little Johnny through college, but it just hasn't been worth it until now. What do you get for your money? Well the specification isn't too bad:
The first thing we did was unpack the system and put it all together. It was nice to see that both the boxes (Protek sent us a monitor with the machine for review purposes) were clearly labelled and the first thing we saw upon opening the system box was a users guide telling us how to put it all together. Even better than that was the fact that, being impatient so-and-sos, we didn't even have to look at the manual when putting it all together because all the ports were labelled (gasp)! It was so nice knowing which way round to plug the mouse and keyboard and being able to get up and running straight away (see previous reviews for more info). Protek had very kindly put Windows 98 already on the machine for us, which obviously isn't going to happen generally because the system doesn't come with an operating system included in the price. With Windows already installed, we could get straight down to doing our testing. It was lucky it didn't take us any time to install the OS because that time and more was used up doing the testing...... It is not unfair to say that the system is slow. Figure 1 shows our benchmarking results and the machine is nowhere near what you would expect in a new machine these days. With a Winstone of 8.33, it is running about half the speed of something like a Celeron 400 system. We've all got to remember of course is that the Celeron would have more memory, which makes a big difference, and cost about ten times as much. Becoming a bit more convinced of the Ultra's potential? The first thing we did was to try and address the benchmarking balance by putting 64Mg of memory in the system. We were expecting to see a relatively large performance jump, but had our plans disrupted by the fact the machine kept freezing at the desktop with a 64mg strip in it. We tried a couple of different ones without success and even two 32Mgs with the same thing. Never to be outdone by such silly things as something not working, we popped into safe mode and found all sorts of problems. We wiped the disk, reloaded and what do you know, it worked! This time round we had a play with Windows to get it running as fast as possible and set the BIOS to its optimums. As you can see from Figure 1., the benchmarks are much improved and it is a nice little system. We didn't do the 3D Mark benchmarks for two reasons; 1. It wouldn't run and 2. The results would have been absolutely dire even if it had. The reason it wouldn,t run was because we didn't have a DirectX 7 video driver and couldn't be bothered to find one, knowing well what the results would be like. In my opinion, if you do fancy a bash on a 3D game every now and then, you can pop in a Voodoo II card for next to nothing and play to your heart's content. The biggest question mark over all this is how can Protek possibly supply the whole machine for £50 when just the hard drive alone must be worth over that? Like all things in life, there's a catch. You can only have the PC at that price if you sign up on Protek's mobile phone deal. The deal? You get an Ericsson Phone, connection to Vodaphone and 300 minutes a month of free calls for £11.99 a month. I'm the first to admit I'm no solicitor, but it doesn't sound like a bad deal to me. You have to sign up for a year, but as I understand it, after that you can cancel the phone, keep it or whatever and the PC is still yours. It's a similar sort of deal that you would get from any mobile phone supplier, so the fact that Protek are putting the subsidy they get into supplying a cheaper PC is superb. The PC itself isn't going to set the world alight, but if you're looking for a second PC or one just for word-processing etc., the Ultra must rank as the best deal you're possibly going to get at the moment. You can upgrade the PC for next to nothing, perhaps by putting in a Voodoo II accelerator, another 32Mg and an AMD K6-III CPU, and get yourself a very respectable games playing machine as well. I know a couple of people that are looking to change their mobile phones at the moment and I'm going to recommend they have a serious look at this deal. I can't really give any higher recommendation than that apart from the One2surf value award as well! The only other problem is what the bloke down the pub is going to do now there's no excuse to buy a PC from him any more. Hope he's paid into a good pension fund.....
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Click to expand:
Figure 1: Specifications:
Processor
RAM/Type
Occupied RAM slots/Spare RAM Slots
Maximum memory in this configuration
Maximum memory supported by motherboard
Hard Disk (Manufacturer + Model)
HD Size/Interface
Motherboard Manufacturer
Model/Chipset
L2 Cache
No of 3.5/5.25in bays
No of free 3.5/5.25in bays
No of PCI/ISA/shared slots
No of free PCI/ISA/shared slots
No of USB/Serial/Parallel/PS2
CD-ROM Manufacturer/Model
CD-ROM Speed/Interface
Sound card manufacturer
Sound card model
Speakers manufacturer and model
Graphics card manufacturer and model
Chipset
RAM/Max RAM and type
Graphics card interface
Modem manufacturer and model
Highest supported modem standard
Bundled software
Standard Warranty
Warranty Options |
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