Any sight of the word 'Pentium' either makes us think of ugly beige boxes coated in 'Intel Inside' decals, or piping-hot Prescotts with haughty heatsinks.

Our collection of processors enter and leave PCs with more frequency than a Dell returns department. Still, we could always be wrong. And this is one such example which proves just that.

£499 gets you a lot, despite the chip at the centre of the action representing the budget end of the market, and is based on the now surpassed Core micro-architecture. The E2160 is a relatively new chip, and it's still dual core, with 1MB of shared cache across the cores.

Zoostorm's inclusion of Windows Vista Home Premium goes some way to enhancing the package, and runs well here. We're not quite sure who is buying the bottom rung of Vista, but Home Basic users are sure to feel like they're being held back by an elastic band before too long.

And unless you specifically want Ultimate, you probably don't know why you'd need it. So it's best to leave this machine as is and settle for the reasonable Home Premium, which includes all the features a PC at that price will need. Once you've shed your preconceptions about the CPU, it's clear this would make a great family PC.

Sound and vision

While it's clearly aimed as a low-cost starter machine, we're more inclined to place it in a different bracket. With its extra power and other accoutrements, we think the Zoostorm would make an excellent centre for family media use.

The latest-gen Nvidia 8600GT may not be range topping, but its 256MB graphics are certainly good enough for the huge majority of games - even if the 3DMark 06 score of 3,844 is distinctly mid-range.

So we're not talking top notch figures, but they're certainly better than we thought they'd be from a machine of this price. The Super PI score of nearly 33 minutes is pretty darn good (better than some of the mobile Core 2 Duo systems we've seen) as is the Windows Experience rating of 4.8.

That was only restricted by the processor and the memory performance. The 8600GT apparently appeals to Vista a great deal with a 5.9 benchmark for Aero reflecting its DirectX 10 readiness.