The Medion 6486 desktop computer, available exclusively in Tesco stores, is built around one of Intel's newest Core 2 Duo processors, the E6750.

This is not quite at the high end of the company's range but it's still a fairly fast computer chip, and that speed is backed up with 2GB of memory and a decent graphics card.

The mini-tower case is fairly small as such computer cases go, and while it's not particularly impressive to look at, that won't be a problem if it's shoved beneath a desk, as these things tend to be.

The front of the case houses two optical drives, a combined DVD and CD reader, and a DVD writer that will read and write all DVD formats, including DVD-Ram. It won't work with Blu-ray or HD-DVD discs, though.

Cheaper computer systems often come without decent graphics cards, which is what draws their overall power down too, but this one includes a very reasonable Nvidia Geforce 8500GT card with 256MB of its own memory.

That, along with the processor and memory mentioned above, helped it to fairly good results in our testing. While it's not up to the pace of a £2,500 gaming rig, nor would you reasonably expect it to be, and it's more than capable of running recent games, albeit with the graphical detail levels turned down a notch or two.

The card comes with both a DVI output for connecting to a monitor, and an HDMI port for connecting to a flat-screen television. The computer even comes with a Media Center remote control for using Vista Home Premium's built-in media software, so it's well set up to be added to a home entertainment system as well as being used for school or office work.

Medion has also thrown in a digital and analogue TV tuner card. The 500GB hard disk is more than adequate, but the price doesn't include a monitor or any extra software.

The wireless keyboard supplied is fine, but the mouse isn't great, so a new keyboard and mouse set could be a good investment. There are three Firewire ports (two at the front, one at the rear) and eight USB ports (split two and six), as well as a network socket, wireless network aerial, surround sound output and video input.

As an impressive addition, it even comes with two eSata ports for connecting newer external hard disks. The only real problem we can see is that there's not much room inside the case to fit expansion cards, but then when there's so much potential to expand using all those ports and sockets, it ceases to be a problem.