Page 1 of £700 Aldi PC next week

Aldi`s latest PC go on sale next Thursday (25th) for £699.99. As ever, the specs are impressive: 3.4GHz Pentium 4; Pioneer dual-layer DVD writer; DVB-T digital TV tuner with remote control; 250Gb hard drive wiith 8MB cache; built-in wireless LAN and Bluetooth; 512MB memory; SCART TV out; 9-in-1 memory card reader; Microsoft Works Suite 2005; etc

BUT

Initial reports from Germany, where it went on sale yesterday, say it is extremely noisy, which is rather disappointing for a multimedia PC. A lot of German buyers seem to be returning their PCs. There will probably be fixes to reduce the noise, but these may invalidate the three-year warranty.

This review (translated by Google) seems to indicate that it is the noisiest PC they have ever tested.

http://*******.***/5w24r

Other drawbacks seems to be a high current consumption and the rather stingy amount of RAM included.

Details should appear in the Aldi UK Web site later today.

Reminds me of the P4 2.0Ghz Medion PC I bought from Aldi in April 2002 - nice machine, but it has a jumbo jet for a fan - ridiculous! I`m still using it now, though, thanks to having the hi-fi on at the same time to drown out the noise. Impossible to leave the PC on and sleep in the same room though.

I`m disappointed that Aldi/Medion aren`t selling 64-bit PCs now (e.g. AMD Athlon 64`s) - I`d pay 700 quid for one with "all the gubbins" (and promptly quad-boot it with three 64-bit Linux distros and beta 64-bit XP :) ). As it stands, I`m more inclined to look at online configurator Web sites such as the Watford Electronics one - you can decide whether you want an OS, keyboard, mouse or monitor with it (as well as choice of CPU).

This item was edited on Thursday, 18th November 2004, 18:03

Who buys a PC from Aldi and even understands what you just said, never mind want to actually do it!!!

I`ve just done some work on one of the Aldi machines from a couple of years ago, and that ran VERY quietly-you really didn`t know it was on unless you got very close to it

The next PC Aldi offered up (October 2002) and several after that were indeed "quiet as church mice", but the April 2002 definitely was *not*. It seems like Medion (who are the German brand Aldi sell) have gone back to their old habits, especially bad when it`s got multimedia features like TV recording etc. - you *must* have a quiet PC for those.

The reason I quite liked the Medion machine I bought was that it didn`t come with a monitor (I`ve got a 21" one, so I see no need to buy any sort of monitor with a new PC in my case - it will almost always be smaller). It`s annoying that the Computer Active mag review of the April 2002 model raved over the one I got and didn`t say a word about the fan noise of the box. If I`d have known it was this noisy, I`d have gone white box shopping instead.

I have owned two Medion PCs -the first one was a 2.6ghz with a CD writer, which I sold and bought the same machine with a DVD burner.

It is on permamently and has not failed me once, the fan be super quiet. The machine lives in our living room and is not noisy at all. I have added an internal 160gb hard drive and also two 160gb externals. I do a lot of photography and prepare slide shows for companies - hence the requirement for space. I have burnt hundreds of DVDs and only occasionally have they failed -more likely the discs than the machine.

I have two teenagers who play games on it - if one playing the others waiting - and recently they have been running Sims2 and Half life2 wih no problems.

I hope to be able to afford this weeks offer as I would like to pass my current machine on to the kids and that way I might get access when I want. The only recommendation I would make is to increase the ram to 1gb.

Ronnie - a very happy medion owner

Impressive spec - you may not know the name on the outside but the branded componenets inside make this a desirable box. Here is the direct link:
http://uk.aldi.com/special_buys/index.html

Meh! You are better off building your own PC these days. The TFT monitor looks good for the price though.

Bet you`d struggle to put that package together for that money you know

I used to build my own PCs, in fact I spent a small fortune upgrading all the time. When the first Aldi came along I priced the individual components and it would have cost the best part of £1500 to buy.

This model is even better as it comes with a three year warranty - now if you build it yourself, who pays for the warranty?

I won`t go to the trouble of breaking down the individual components but I would reckon you would struggle to buy them for under £700. I would like to be proved wrong if you want to work it out.

Medion man - Big Tron

I got one just about a year ago now. I did the same, priced the compnoents up, and you couldn`t do it yourself for the money. It came to £150 more than they were charging.

I um and ahhed too long, and Aldi ended up out of stock, but got a similar one from ToysRus instead with a slightly better 256mb graphics card. It`s been a great PC, no problems at all over the last year, and whisper quiet. Maybe the test PC on the German site was just a bad one, I guess there`ll be faulty ones in any product.

I remember someone having a really noisy one on here around the time I got mine. I think he got it sorted through Medion though.

By the way, Medion isn`t a manufacturer. They`re a middleman type company. They find new outlets for products that companies wouldn`t normally sell through ie: computers from a supermarket. The Medion /Tevion names are just to give a corporate image, but can be built by a multitude of manufacturers. The PC`s are all well known components inside, Intel, nVidia, Seagate, Western Digital, Pioneer, Sony, etc.

ToysRus also has some nice models on now too, very similar to the Aldi ones again.