This tiny small form-factor PC will take up less space on your desk. The modest In-Win BM643 case is custom-fitted with an equally tiny 160W power supply, engineered to meet the requirements of such a small PC. In our tests, the MPC-2100 drew 22W when idle and just 55W when going full-tilt – CyberPower’s Essential 3000 requires this amount to just sit there idle. See also Group test: What's the best budget PC?
Of course, with a dual-core 3.3GHz Intel Core i3-2120 installed, ‘full-tilt’ isn’t quite as speedy as some of the competition here. However, with a WorldBench 6 score of 154 points it’s faster than any of the quad-core AMD-based PCs, and even Eclipse’s 3.1GHz Intel system. Visit Group test: What's the mid-range desktop PC?
The PC crams in 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 1TB SATA hard disk, plus you get a 120GB Intel 300-series SSD which greatly improves responsiveness in conjunction with the Intel DH67CF motherboard.
Like all of our review systems this PC comes with a built-in DVD±RW drive, but the slimline version designed to fit into this case is only one-third the speed of the usual 24x models. There is a multi-format card reader included. For its size, the MPC-2100 certainly does come feature-packed.
As you might expect, no graphics card is included so you’ll have to make do with the simple Intel HD Graphics 2000 processor built into the Core i5 CPU. In the unlikely event that you need more than this, there is a 16x PCI-Express slot on the motherboard – although space is exceedingly tight.
Windows 7 Professional is included, along with Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Edition. Go to Group test: What's the best office PC?
