Labs

Zoostorm has really gone to town on this machine, taking fairly obvious inspiration from Apple, with a stylish white finish that encompasses the base unit, monitor, keyboard and mouse to give the zStyle Premium Family PC a very modern feel. The front of the case looks minimalist thanks to a sliding door that covers the 3.5in drives and card reader, and there's plenty crammed into the petite box.

The ECS motherboard may not have space for an IDE connector - hence the choice of a rare SATA DVD writer - but there are enough PCI and PCI Express slots for an 802.11g wireless card anda

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hybrid analogue/digital TV tuner.

The latter comes with its own remote and you also get a small pair of Genius speakers. Note, this isn't the quietest PC, though. The AOC monitor carefully follows the colour scheme, and is unusual this month in that it isn't widescreen. The 19in panel has a 1,280 x 1,024 resolution and performs well enough: text is crisp and colours are accurate, if a little green in parts. Gamers who'd prefer a widescreen display may be further put off by the 8600 GT graphics card, which struggled compared with the better cards in our 3D benchmarks. What's more, with no second graphics card slot and only a 350W power supply, there isn't a great deal of room for later improvement.

This PC wasn't built for gaming, though, and 2D applications ran smoothly throughout our tests. The Core 2 Duo E6750 and 2GBof RAM gave the Zoostorma healthy 1.32 score in our benchmarks, and the 320GB hard disk is adequate for most storage needs. The Hiper keyboard feelsa little cheap, but the Sweex mouse is stylish. We'd have preferred a widescreen TFT to make the most of the TV tuner, but the zStyle Premium Family PC is a stylish machine that won many admirers.