Software Evaluation
One thing we pay special attention to on system and notebook reviews is
the software – does the vendor load the system down to a point that the
average user will notice a slow down and be unable to remove the
bloatware or is the system clean and sharp out of the box?
The desktop of the AVADirect system differs quite a bit when compared to that of the Alienware Area-51 system we review earlier in the week. For one, AVADirect left the Windows widget bar on the screen – something that might be interesting to some users but for me, I always turn it off. Also note the icons on the desktop in the left side and in the taskbar in the lower right – obviously there is some software installed on this system that we may not really need.
Looking at the My Computer screen on the machine we see two drives / partitions: the 300GB VelociRaptor hard drive that acts as the primary system drive while the pair of Western Digital 500GB 7200 RPM drives are setup in a RAID 1 array to represent the F: partition. The primary drive has 23GB in use out of the box.
The device manager shows us the four CPU cores of the Q9450, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ and the other devices installed in the system.
The system screen obviously puts the AVADirect system in at the upper limit of the Windows Experience Index rating: 5.9. It also shows the 2.66 GHz CPU is overclocked to 3.40 GHz with 4GB of system memory and a 64-bit operating system.
One area we tend to see bloatware in is Internet Explorer – there is no better place to installed add-ons and ad software against the user than here. AVADirect has done the consumer a good deed here by leaving the default IE installation alone.
Looking at the application uninstallation window we see the various programs that AVADirect installed on the system including Nero 7 Essentials, Acronis and LightScribe. Most of the icons on the desktop were from various parts of the Nero Essentials software – so while I usually hate seeing any kind of software on a “clean” machine the Nero software is necessary to utilize your DVD burners so this is likely acceptable.
Thats a really sick build!
Thats a really sick build! AVA direct has some really good systems, plus that cooler master case is soo nice.
great review!
You should also check out
You should also check out some of my custom desktops.