Advent Firefly FP9004 review

We see plenty of cheap PCs in the PC Pro Labs, but the majority that manage to creep beneath the £300 barrier do so by using low-powered Atom processors. That’s fine for a basic nettop, but if your needs extend to more processor-intensive applications what you really want is a full-fat, dual-core alternative packing Windows 7. Step forward the Advent Firefly FP9004.

Its £278 exc VAT price puts it firmly in ultra-low budget territory, but you wouldn’t know it from using it. The glossy black chassis is big enough to house the necessary cooling for a proper processor, and Advent has opted for Intel’s 2.6GHz Pentium Dual-Core E5300. It’s at the low end of the scale, but it still performs around three times faster than a dual-core Atom 330 in our application benchmarks.

The Firefly partners this CPU with 2GB of DDR2 memory and a 320GB Western Digital Caviar Blue hard disk, and its overall score of 1.11 shows it’s more than capable of coping with the daily needs of a family or home office. The trade-off for this is that it’s nowhere near as compact as some other cheap systems we’ve seen – the redesigned Asus Eee Box, for example.

It is flexible, though. It can stand upright or lie on a desk, and the top edge forms the main air vent grille. The sleek front panel, split down the centre by a white LED, makes it look more expensive than it is, and we’d almost go so far as to call it mildly stylish. It isn’t too large – around 300mm tall and 320mm deep – so it will tuck away on the corner of a desk where a full desktop chassis might stick out. It isn’t exactly built like a Lenovo but the finish feels sturdy enough, with only the flimsy DVD drive flap posing a potential weakness.

Open it up and you’ll see everything is rather snug inside; Advent has used every inch of the available space. The 250W power supply sits at the foot of the chassis, beneath a microATX Foxconn motherboard, while a stock Intel cooler sits atop the CPU. No expansion cards are installed as standard, but there are PCI Express x16 and x1 slots free should you want to add a graphics card or TV tuner. However, the single RAM slot is filled, so there isn’t much scope for boosting performance.

The hard disk and DVD writer are crammed at the front of the case – both full desktop models, the former a good-quality 7,200rpm drive – and the front panel also houses a card reader for all the major card formats. Two USB ports and 3.5mm audio connectors complete the list; a further four USB ports adorn the rear. There’s only 10/100 Ethernet, rather than full Gigabit, but that’s compensated by the 802.11bgn wireless dongle that’s bundled with the PC – a nice inclusion that few desktop PC manufacturers seem to think worthwhile.

The one area – apart from size – where the Advent can’t match the little Eee Box and its ilk is in graphics performance. With Intel’s X3100 chip integrated on the motherboard, it won’t have you playing the latest 3D games, and it also struggles when decoding 1080p video clips, such as those on YouTube. This isn’t primarily a PC built for entertainment, then.

But it is a PC with novice consumers in mind, and we have to praise the initial boot experience: rather than chucking a barrage of bloatware at every user, you’re given a comprehensive menu list of available software, which you can select or deselect for installation. It’s all on the hard disk taking up space and a good portion of it is indeed pretty useless, but when you can make your own decision it feels a lot less frustrating – other manufacturers would do well to take note.

All in all, the Advent Firefly FP9004 is a well-specified machine at an attractive price. You could compare it to the current raft of nettops, but it isn’t really intended as a competitor – their smaller size and focus on basic tasks and decoding media make them more of a consumer option. This Advent is better compared to budget PCs, and in this arena it really does stand out.

Your £278 gets you a perfectly good dual-core processor, a capacious hard disk and 802.11n wireless, all in a smart yet slim package. It’s a base unit only, but if you already have a monitor to re-use from an old PC the Advent packs an awful lot of value into its little frame. Compare it to a price of around £300 exc VAT for the latest Atom-powered Eee Box and it looks even better.

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