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Commodore XX

Commodore's flagship XX is expensive, but your money does buy the cream of Intel hardware
Don't worry, not all Commodores look like the north end of a southbound train - you can configure yours with a 'C-kin' paint job of your choosing. Assuming you want to spend almost £3,000 on a rig that does the same job as the one you have, only a bit faster.

Commodore's flagship XX is expensive. It's in the same park as rivals, the XPS 720 H2C is £2,599, Alienware's Area-51 ALX is an eyewatering £3,089, but that doesn't change the fact it's second-hand car money. Factor in the depreciation that eats at every new PC and you may as well be dropping piggy banks down a lift shaft.

The company does have several other models in its line-up, but the cheapest of those is still £300 more than Chillblast's Fusion Colossus, and I find it sad that one of the more distinguished names in home computing - original motto, "Computers for the masses" - has been resurrected without a genuinely mass market model.

DEEPLY RAPID
But your money does buy the cream of Intel hardware, making everything you do seem pleasingly brief. Applications no longer open and close but flick on and off like bedside lamps.

Every mundane task, from unpacking archives, patching games, working with audio or video, is dispatched in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Striped drives send level load times tumbling, and pushing the resolution up from 1280 x 1024 pixels to 1680 x 1050 has virtually no effect on frame rates, meaning today's Commodore is truly just as capable of planting a smile on your face as any predecessor.

Only I'm not sure I could sleep at night knowing it's in my house. Aside from nightmares about the credit card bill, I'd quickly discover that the XX is long on noise, short on expansion, short on warranty and not manifestly faster than machines in the sub-grand bracket, unless you have a desire to run senselessly high levels of detail.

MISTER FREEZE
Some of the £1,500 systems we tested previously had proved just as rapid, and so I tried squeezing a little more from the Commodore in its BIOS. However, I ran into trouble with the ASUS board's automated 'AI' overclocking, where two of the tweaking presets left the machine unbootable.

Then there's the fact the Commodore website has no forum, no community, no knowledgebase, so no easy way to get some peer-to-peer support, and it makes no mention driver updates nor how to contact technical support. This lack of backup doesn't quite add up.

PC Zone Magazine
// Interactive
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Read all 11 commentsPost a Comment
This is why I'm console only.
Cheese on 22 Oct '07
Because some pcs are more expensive than others?
jvgp100 on 22 Oct '07
This message is not being displayed because the poster is banned.
humorguy on 22 Oct '07
Here! Here, Fob-a-door more like!
FunkYellowMonkey on 22 Oct '07
This is why I'm console only.

Mine cost well under £1k and i've been playing the UT3 demo all week. Oh, and it's a laptop.
Robodonkey on 22 Oct '07
Slightly off topic but I noticed they had "classic" commodore games on their website that you can play on your browser. I was excited to see what they had until I saw their list of games that I've never heard of. Also, when I tried to play one of their games the sound got screwed up and started playing in a loop even after I had closed the page. I had to close my entire browser to get rid of it.
Anonymous on 22 Oct '07
Humourguy has it spot on.

If Commodore made a "Gaming Rig" that sat in shops at a tempting price - maybe with a custom paint job, 30 and 40 something Dads might have been hard pressed not to buy it.

My Amiga cost me £399 but was an awesome games machine.

Sub £1000 rigs with decent high end cards are only slightly slower than this "Commodore" £3K machine.

Such a shame for a well loved brand.

Problem is there are no margins left in sub £1000 PC's also they have to face up to powerful consoles at the fraction of their price.
tungst3n on 23 Oct '07
As an Amiga fan to see the Commodore name with a price tag like that is shocking!

If they got them in stores at a reasonable price a lot of people would recognise the Commodore name and snap them up. It's a name etched in peoples minds since the C64, Amiga and others.

With Dell and HP offering PC in the sub £1000 range that can run games really well it's hard to justify purchasing this.

Hopefully the next machine they bring out is aimed at a different segment of the market and offers a fantastic price/performance ratio.
vectra on 23 Oct '07
Actually this is just the highest end machine they have and it's a huge beast if i may say so, myself i have the sub £1000 machine from them and i love it.

all these people crying havoc even before they check out what they are offering. high end gaming pc's are expensive and if you want performance it's going to cost you.

but so far im really happy with mine.
Dirge on 23 Oct '07
Actually this is just the highest end machine they have and it's a huge beast if i may say so, myself i have the sub £1000 machine from them and i love it.

all these people crying havoc even before they check out what they are offering. high end gaming pc's are expensive and if you want performance it's going to cost you.

but so far im really happy with mine.

I just checked out the website and am not impressed. Mainly because I can put together a similar system for a much better cost but also I can get a similar system for a lot cheaper and with a better warranty than what Commodore is offering.

I know you pay for performance and what they reviewed was top of the line. However none of their range says cost friendly from their XX range right to the G range.

All their configs come without monitors, keyboards and mice as well for that price as well. That is just a joke. Rolling Eyes
vectra on 23 Oct '07
This is why you should make your own PC. You can add anything you want to it, it's customed made so you can get the most out of your PC, often times blowing away what the market has to offer.

It's also easy. If you take apart and put back together a PC then your half-way there. There is often a forum online you can go to that can help you out.


In short, save yourself a couple thousand by buying parts to make your own PC.
mentor07825 on 1 Mar '09
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