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Multivision is still a relatively new player in the PC market, but it offers some amazing computers at very affordable prices. It is also an innovative company that is not afraid of trying new things, and looking at the case that the Ionix 96 Delta comes in you’ll notice that very individual.

It is Multivision’s own design and it looks very majestic with a long blue LED running vertically down the front. All drives are hidden behind special fascias and the two spare drive bays comes with flip down covers that locks in place to hide any beige drives you might fit. This is very novel, but the top drives have been fitted with stick on fronts that are less than impressive and might even fall off if you’re not careful. A great feature of the case is the two side mounted USB 2.0 ports as well as a single FireWire port. This give easy access to the ports but reduces the risk of damaging them, although the flap that covers the ports is very flimsy.

More important is what you find inside the case and a 3000+ AMD Athlon XP processor and 512MB of PC3200 DDR memory make up the core of the Ionix 96 Delta. This is fitted to an MSI K7N2 Delta-IL motherboard that offers integrated 10/100Mbit LAN as well as FireWire. You also get the advantage of the nVidia MCP-T which adds Dolby Digital 5.1-channel sound. There are also dedicated outputs for the rear and centre/subwoofer channels along with coaxial and optical S/PDIF outputs.

A 160GB Seagate hard drive is the main storage device which should offer plenty of space. Optical storage comes courtesy of an NEC DVD writer that can handle all DVD formats bar DVD-RAM and CD media. The second optical drive is a DVD-ROM unit from MSI.

We find it a bit odd that Multivision has supplied a set of 6.1-channel speakers with the Ionix 96 Delta as the onboard sound is only capable of 5.1-channel sound. However the Creative Labs Inspire 6100 speakers are capable of up-sampling 5.1 to 6.1-channel sound.

The display is the same 18in NEC TFT as the one seen with the Mesh system and offers 1,280 x 1,024 resolution. We would rather have seen a better quality 17in display than this average 18in unit since the resolution is the same. However, at least the Multivision system can connect to its monitor via DVI producing a much clearer image than the Mesh.

The Connec3D Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card features both DVI and D-SUB, so you could even have dual monitor support if you have another screen handy. This is a reasonable graphics card and it’s fast enough for most of today’s games.

A Logitech keyboard and optical mouse are supplied and work very well. However, they’re not quite as good as the wireless Microsoft kits we have seen with a couple of the other PCs.

Multivision doesn’t supply a lot in the way of software, but a copy of Ability Office XP is included that can cope with most of the tasks that Microsoft’s Office package is capable of.

The Ionix 96 Delta did well in most of the benchmarks and managed to snag second place in Sysmark 2002 and top in PCMark 2002’s CPU score. It did however not do too well in either version of 3DMark but the scores are more than acceptable and in line with what a Radeon 9600 Pro should score.

Performance isn’t everything and we were looking for a well rounded system rather than a performance monster.

Verdict

Even though Multivision is close it’s not perfect as we would have liked to see some kind of TV tuner or video capture device. The Ionix 96 Delta is still a very capable system and if you’re not interested in the multimedia features this is a quality PC which has a lot going for it

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