Advent Eco PC review

The Eco PC ships with Windows Vista Home Premium edition and a copy of Cyberlink Power2Go disc creation software. Advent has thoughtfully supplied all the PC's manuals in Adobe PDF form in an attempt to minimise the amount of paper wasted.

Performance
The Eco PC's eco credentials are good, but not as good as they could have been. It uses 25W while idle -- when the PC is doing absolutely nothing -- and approximately 50W when under a full load -- when the CPU is performing full tilt.

It's difficult to calculate exactly how much this will cost you in electricity, but for reference, our trusty 6-year-old HP desktop, which uses an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPU, consumes a whopping 150W while idle. This shows you how little power the Eco PC uses, but bear in mind: if Advent had used an Atom CPU, as seen in many netbooks and some eco desktops, it could consume as little as 17W under a full load.

Processing power isn't the Eco PC's strong point. It did, however, rack up a not-too-shabby 3,310 in PCMark 2005. This figure puts it in line with most laptops with a core 2 Duo CPU speed in the region of 1.5-1.8GHz. This should serve most people well, as it's fast enough to run 1080p video and crunch its way through applications like Photoshop without stuttering too badly.

Conclusion
The Eco PC can save you money on electricity, but you'll need to be at least an 8-hours-a-day, every day kind of user in order to reap any serious rewards. It's also fairly pricey, so you'll also have to keep it for a good few years before it starts paying for itself.

Edited by Marian Smith