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Advent PQG9002 PC Review
| Author | Ardjuna Seghers |
| Published | 13th Aug 2009 |
| Manufacturer | Advent |
| Supplier | Dixons |
| Price | £452.17 (Exc VAT) |
| as reviewed | £519.99 (Inc VAT) |
| Latest Price | Click here |
| Build Quality |  |
| Design |  |
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TrustedReviews NewslettersWhen we received Advent's PQG9002 PC in the office, I was prepared to be moderately impressed. After all, a Quad Core Phenom backed by 4GB of RAM, a 640GB hard drive and an ATI Radeon 4350 for £519 might not be stellar, but would still appear to be decent value.
The first thing I did, being an inquisitive type, was to undo the screws and slide the left side panel off, which required a bit of force. This led to the discovery that the CPU's fan draws in air from outside through a plastic heat-tunnel attached to the left panel, a nice touch that worked well when I encountered a similar shroud on the Dell Studio XPS.
Good points continued with a passively-cooled Foxconn motherboard, fanless Radeon 4350 graphics card, and a competent-looking CoolerMaster fan over the Phenom X4 9150e (which runs at a modest 1.8GHz). At this stage you're probably thinking what I was: the PQG9002 is going to be one very quiet machine, despite its extra 80mm case fan and 80mm PSU fan.
Unfortunately, any such illusions were immediately dispelled when I switched the PC on. And not just for me either; people on the other side of the office were wondering aloud who had turned the air-conditioning on. To put it simply, this small, innocent-looking PC is the loudest non-gaming machine we've had through the labs in years, and it appears that the CoolerMaster fan, of all things, is mostly to blame.
Nor do the PQG9002's problems end there. Advent has only made the barest of token gestures at cable tidying, though to be fair it's nothing that will affect air-flow. Getting the side panel back on the case is also a major pain, and requires a lot of experimenting before you get the 'trick', something more suited to a Chinese puzzle than a PC.
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ilovethemonkeyhead said on 13th August 2009
Ardjuna said on 13th August 2009
@ilovethemonkeyhead:
We checked the BIOS to see if we could alter the fan settings but no luck - and the system should come preconfigured at its most silent anyway, since ma... more
Martin Daler said on 15th August 2009
a bit of a tangent...
my Dell desktop Studio XPS - recently purchased - sounded like someone doing the hoovering with a full bag, I gave Dell grief, they swapped out the rea... more
Ardjuna said on 21st August 2009
@Martin Daler:
Thanks for the interesting and useful info. You may want to add this to the enthusiastic discussion surrounding the Studio XPS Desktop (http://www.trustedrevi... more
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i think the fan loudness is to do with a rogue bios setting somehow. i recall having an advent t11 that spent the first year of its life in silence. then, after taking it to a free... more