Product of the week

PCs: Jal Adhira

Moving away from the rather bland ATX cases used by most Jal PCs, the top-of-the-range Adhira is housed in a striking Thermaltake Shark ATX chassis. The blue LEDs and glow-in-the-dark IDE cables make it even more attractive, especially for image-conscious customers such as media companies. It has a mostly screwless design, making it easy to add or remove components, as many are simply held in place with clips. Although this design is fine in everyday use, it is more susceptible to damage in rough transit than standard cases where components are secured with screws.

Jal has used the DFI NF4 SLI DR motherboard, which is only compatible with standard double data rate (DDR) memory. This is slower than DDR2, but a total of 2GB has been included – twice as much as its nearest rival. It’s also interesting to see a PC bundled with Windows XP x64 Edition. We tested its video-encoding performance with both 32bit and 64bit Windows, with good results. In 64bit mode, it encoded our test video in 13 minutes, 10 seconds, and in 32bit mode it was around 30 seconds slower.

The Adhira’s SLI-linked Geforce 6600 GT cards are better than a single Radeon X850 on another system for some games, but they suffer in titles that need a lot of video memory. Doom 3, for example, refuses to run with full anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.

The 19in Viewsonic VX924 has a 4ms response time, so the likelihood of ghosting effects in games is very low. The Adhira isn’t the fastest PC, but it is a good all-rounder. Do bear in mind, though, that 64bit Windows doesn’t support every 32bit application, and device driver support for older peripherals can be patchy.