VPNArea is a popular and well-established VPN run by the Bulgarian-based firm Offshore Security EOOD.
The service has a lengthy list of appealing features. It covers 60+ countries all around the world, has support for six simultaneous connections, DNS and WebRTC leak blocking, P2P support and a clear ‘no logs’ claim.
The company offers custom clients for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS, which usually makes for easier setup. It also indicates a provider with some resources behind it, as opposed to just being some guy reselling servers from his bedroom.
Prices are reasonable at around $10 (£8) for a month, $8.33 (£6.66) a month if you pay for six months upfront, or $4.92 (£3.94) a month with an annual contract.
The company has a ‘dedicated IP’ option which it says gets you your own private VPN server from $15 (£12) a year extra. We’d guess there’s a catch somewhere, but even if it’s just a dedicated IP, that’s a good price.
There’s no trial, but VPNArea does offer a seven-day refund. This isn’t automatic – you have to request it by sending an email – and as usual with VPNs, you’re not covered if you’ve previously claimed a refund from the company. But otherwise there are no sneaky ‘can’t have used more than x amount of bandwidth’-type exclusions, and VPNArea’s website states “we have never refused a refund request”, not a claim we remember seeing elsewhere.
Privacy
VPNArea’s website highlights the fact that it doesn’t keep logs, and the company FAQ page provides a little more detail.
“Our hosting is based in Switzerland. Our company is registered in Bulgaria. Since we’re not an internet provider we do not fall under the data-retention laws in the country where the company is registered. Therefore we do not keep logs of your activity.”
The company doesn’t tell us whether it logs or retains session data: login dates, times, incoming and outgoing IP addresses, bandwidth used and so on. That’s not a critical issue, but we prefer VPN providers that spell out these details, too.
VPNArea’s policy on disclosure of personal information is more encouraging. Many other providers say they’ll hand it over if they believe it to be a legal requirement, which could just mean they’re persuaded by whoever is asking. VPNArea says it won’t do anything until it gets a court order, and will “fight every legal request for compliance with the law”. Although as the company also says it hasn’t received any requests yet, it doesn’t seem like much of a risk.
Elsewhere, VPNArea’s strongest privacy plus is its signup form. While other companies often demand a physical address, and sometimes even your phone number, here you can get started with nothing more than your email.
While scouring the small print we also noticed that VPNArea allows account sharing with friends, family or colleagues, something explicitly forbidden by most providers. The company also says it recommends no more than two users connect at the same time, and it probably won’t accept both of you downloading torrents 24/7, but this is still much more flexibility than you’ll usually see elsewhere.
Performance
Choosing your VPNArea plan is unusually easy, as the company crams everything onto a single page: a comparison table for the various plans, the form for creating a user account, a choice of payment details (card, PayPal, Bitcoin), even a FAQ to clarify some important product issues. This makes for a lot of vertical scrolling, but it’s much better than some other providers, where you don’t even get to see the demand to enter your phone number (or whatever) until you’re several steps into the purchase process.
This mostly worked as expected, although we were a little disappointed to see the password field didn’t support symbols. It’s surely not that difficult to implement, and not the kind of issue we’d expect from a security company.
After we’d paid, the website displayed a clear page with our username, registered email address, and a link to the Members Area where we could log in. Within seconds an excellent welcome email arrived with extra details including links to the main clients and advice on where we could go for support.
VPNArea’s Windows client is more complex than most. While others strip even desktop clients to a minimum – click a flag and connect right away – VPNArea crams in as many details as it can.
The servers and speed tab lists servers by city, for instance, not just by country. It’s a very long list, and there’s no Favourites system to bypass it. But there are also useful extras, like the ability to select multiple servers and run speed tests on them in a couple of clicks.
We ran a few tests – and came across a worrying problem. Almost whenever we ran the regular Flash applet at Speedtest.net, VPNArea’s log pane reported an error message (Authenticate/Decrypt packet error: bad packet ID) and dropped the connection. The client doesn’t display any notification of this, not even an audio warning, and if you carry on working online you’ll be giving away your real IP.
We’re no idea how common this might be (it didn’t happen with any other site, or at any other time), or whether it affects other platforms. At any rate, you can guard against this issue by enabling the ‘kill switch’, which shuts off web traffic if your connection drops. But it’s still a concern that you can lose the connection without any notification beyond the client window, which will probably be minimised and out of sight.
Once we figured out how to run performance tests*, VPNArea gave us mixed results. UK and near-European connections delivered a reasonable 20-30Mbps, but head overseas and the picture isn’t clear. Some US connections were good, for instance – 25Mbps to Miami, 22Mbps to Los Angeles – but speeds elsewhere fell to 5Mbps from one New York server, 12Mbps in New Jersey. This suggests you should get acceptable performance most of the time, but might have to switch servers occasionally.
We completed our evaluation with some privacy tests, and these were more successful. VPNArea correctly shielded our identity at all times, blocking DNS and WebRTC leaks without any extra effort on our part.
Final verdict
VPNArea’s connection drops were annoying, but if you can avoid them there’s a lot to like here. Overall, this provider is worth a try, especially for experts who’ll appreciate the configuration options here, but be sure to test the service carefully.
*Our testing included evaluating general performance (browsing, streaming video). We also used speedtest.net to measure latency, upload and download speeds, and then tested immediately again with the VPN turned off, to check for any difference (over several rounds of testing). We then compared these results to other VPN services we’ve reviewed. Of course, do note that VPN performance is difficult to measure as there are so many variables.
The iPhone is a great little camera, but with add-on lenses, the right stabilization, and an app that unlocks manual control, you’ll be thanking the Academy in no time. Go to Source
Large, imposing and featuring a customisable built-in light show, the Mesh Ryzen 7 Gaming PC-A delivers stunning build quality with striking tempered glass panels and the latest AMD processor technology inside. Here’s our Mesh Ryzen 7 GAMING PC-A review. Also see:Best desktop PCs
Mesh Ryzen 7 Gaming PC-A price
You can buy the Mesh Ryzen 7 GAMING PC-A direct from Mesh online. When the page opens, you can click “add to cart” to buy our review configuration or “customise” to change the spec to suit your own needs – and to be quite honest, we suggest that you do.
Mesh Ryzen 7 Gaming PC-A design and build
This is an imposing beast of a PC even before you turn on the power thanks to tempered glass side panels which give a clear view of the components inside. These include the latest AMD Ryzen 7 1700X eight-core processor and a powerful Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics card.
The Thermaltake View 31 tempered glass RGB Edition Mid Tower chassis into which the system is built is a heavy, expensive-looking case that sits wider than the typical mid-tower PC and is fitted with glass side panels which let you see every single internal component from both sides. It also contains a trio of 140mm fans at the front which can be set to any of 256 available colours which glow through meshed front of the case. Another set of these same illuminated fans is also fitted to the top of the case.
Taking full advantage of the glass panels, Mesh has ensured that most of the rest of internal parts also support RGB illumination: firing up the PC for the first time results in the kind of sensory overload you’d get from turning on a set of christmas lights without taking them out of the box. LEDs hit you from all directions, gradually transitioning through a rainbow of gaudy colours, giving the PC a second function as a sort of high-tech lava lamp replacement.
Thankfully, whether these effects appear garish and jarring or rather more subtly engaging is entirely up to you, as the whole lot can be customised to your own preferences under software control. Keep the glass clean of fingerprints and the system really can look rather impressive.
On a more practical level, the case’s modular design allows for a variety of internal configurations and comes with removable dust filters which are especially important when the PC’s internals are constantly on show. See allgaming PC reviews
Mesh Ryzen 7 Gaming PC-A processor
The Ryzen 7 1700X processor sits in the middle of AMD’s Ryzen 7 range and features 8 cores and 16 threads at 3.4GHz, boosting to a maximum 3.8 GHz for an individual core. The processor is topped with a tidy-looking Corsair H60 Hydro Series liquid cooler and the whole PC is powered by a 650W Corsair RM650x PSU.
An Asus AMD AM4 Ryzen PRIME X370 Pro motherboard forms the basis for this PC build. This is an advanced motherboard with support for both Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFireX dual-graphics configurations, enhanced audio hardware, 10Gb/sec USB 3.1 support and a slew of overclocking and fan control options. Also key to this particular system is its support of Aura sync RGB lighting which can co-ordinate the various illuminated components in the system and place them under the control of a single software application offering preset effects modes and user customisation.
The motherboard’s M.2 slot is filled with a 250GB WD Blue SSD, and this is unfortunately a rather disappointing feature in what is an otherwise impressive gaming PC. Using an M.2 SSD is a great idea as it requires no cables and only a tiny amount of space, but a drive based on out-dated SATA technology rather than a much faster NVMe model is, we feel, rather less than a PC at this price point would deserve.
A Samsung 950 Evo NVMe drive would cost around £50 more, but deliver far greater performance. While the cost saving may be worth it to some users, it seems a strange one to make as Mesh has elected to install Windows 10 Pro rather than the Home edition, wiping out any cost saving made on the SSD and delivering no real benefit to most gamers. The PC is also supplied with a separate 1TB hard drive, where many other systems at this price might give you 2TB.
Of course, the GTX 1070 graphics card selected for this system is an Asus STRIX ROG model, with matching RGB lighting support, although it’s not the factory overclocked version.
Mesh Ryzen 7 Gaming PC-A performance
As with all Ryzen 7-based PCs the Mesh Ryzen 7 Gaming PC-A comes into its own when performing many tasks simultaneously or exploiting the kind of parallel processing algorithms found in workstation-class software such as Cinebench R15. Unfortunately, this doesn’t translate into the best gaming performance results, although the system is certainly quite competent, you could certainly achieve better frame rates at this price, especially if you’re willing to sacrifice some of the, admittedly impressive, cosmetic enhancements offered by this PC.
There’s also the reduced storage performance you get from the SATA SSD which is reflected in the system’s rather low PCMark 8 Storage score and also has a detrimental effect on the other PCMark scores too. While this has no bearing on those all-important gaming frame rates, it will increase loading times on larger titles.
The included GTX 1070 graphics card is a good choice, offering solid performance results at high resolutions and quality settings. But, because the card isn’t factory overclocked, it’s not achieving the very best results we’ve seen from other GTX 1070s. It does however come with software tools to overclock it yourself, which should enable you to eke out some extra frames per second when you need them.
Overall then, performance is good, but it could be better. If you like this PC we’d suggest you consider customising the build slightly to speed it up a bit, especially if you don’t need Windows 10 Pro.
Mesh Ryzen 7 Gaming PC-A warranty
Mesh offers a lifetime warranty on labour, but parts are only covered for the first two years. For the first year only, a full collect and return service is provided. Much better warranty terms are available elsewhere.
The Acer Swift 5 is the sort of laptop to make you think twice about buying a MacBook. It’s slim, light, powerful, and still cost hundreds of pounds less than the comparable Apple model. And even the comparable Dell XPS.
Acer and Asus are masters at this game. There are Asus ZenBooks with slightly more expensive-looking designs (from the outside at least) than the Swift 5, and if you really want to spend as little as possible, we’d suggest looking at the Swift 3 too. It’s great.
However, these comparisons don’t take away from the Acer Swift 5’s brilliance. It’s versatile, very light, its screen is excellent for the price and it is great value.
Acer Swift 5: Price and availability
There are two versions of Acer Swift 5. The model we were sent for review is the lower-end of the two, the model most likely to appeal to those who want an expensive-looking, light laptop that will still leave plenty of change from £1000.
For £749 you get a seventh-generation Intel Core i5 CPU, a 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. The closest Dell XPS 13 will cost you almost £300 more.
An Intel Core i7 upgrade costs £100, and the step up to a 512GB SSD is another £100, topping out at £949.
As well as easily beating Dell on price, Acer also appears to beat arch-rival Asus. Its closest alternative, the ZenBook UX330, costs £849 for roughly the same innards as the £749 Swift 5.
Unlike most laptops, the Swift 5 comes with a 2-year warranty rather than just the one year, but it’s a “carry-in” warranty. This means you’ll have to hunt down a service centre, requiring a bit more effort than a collect-and-return or onsite warranty.
Acer Swift 5: Design
When we reviewed the Acer Swift 3, we were surprised to see an all-aluminium laptop at such a low price. Despite being more expensive, the Swift 5 actually gets rid of some of the metal, presumably in order to get thinner and lighter.
The underside is high-friction soft-touch plastic. It’s great at keeping the laptop in place should you use the Swift 5 on your knees, but means this isn’t an “all-metal” computer. Initially we thought the ridged lid was plastic too, but it is coated metal. Making metal look and feel a bit like plastic is a strange move, but it wouldn’t be the first such move Acer has made.
It’s one of those rare laptops that seems to want to impress you rather than the people in Starbucks looking at you tapping away as you sip a latte. Acer makes some of the quirkiest design choices in laptop land, and while the unusual lid texture is another example, it’s likely to split the audience rather than turn everyone off.
The benefits in cost and design are worth it anyway. At 1.3kg, the Swift 5 is very light for a somewhat affordable laptop, for example. And the 14.6mm thickness gives you virtually the same practical benefits as the thinnest laptops in the world.
For a bit of context on what more money can get you, the £1300 Hp Spectre 13 is 1.1kg and 10.4mm thick. The difference is real. But is it worth an extra £550?
While Acer hasn’t truly capitalised on the still-fancy materials used to make the Swift 5, its build is actually very good once you start prodding the thing. The screen doesn’t flex too much, and there’s virtually zero flex to the keyboard, which is more than we can say for some of Asus’s most recent laptops.
Any shortcomings here are really about the look. We’d suggest you do you best to look beyond them, given how great this laptop is to actually use.
Connections
A true crowd-pleaser, the Swift 5 does not lop off all traditional connections like some of the most recent, most expensive laptops. Instead, there’s a bit of everything.
You get two full-size USB 3.0 ports for all your normal accessories and peripherals, plus a USB-C 3.1 port for any newer gear that shifts to this standard.
Just as important, there’s a full-size SD slot and an HDMI, letting you connect to a TV or monitor. If you don’t want to have to buy any extra adapters or cables, this is the sort of connector arsenal you need. These connectors alone may be worth the extra 4mm thickness, compared to the latest 10mm-thick crowd.
Keyboard and touchpad
There’s another extra too, a fingerprint scanner on the trackpad. These are starting to appear on a lot of new laptops, taking the lead set by phones in giving you a way to log in without using a password or pin.
It uses one of Windows 10’s built-in features, Hello. This is what lets you login using a finger scanner or camera-driven face recognition.
Like most we’ve tried recently, the Acer Swift 5’s scanner isn’t 100 percent reliable and sometimes takes a couple of attempts to work. However, it seems less of an issue when we’re clearly not paying masses of extra money for the feature.
Saying that, we’d be happy to sacrifice it for a textured glass touchpad.
The Swift 5’s is plastic, and therefore isn’t immune to a bit of finger friction squeak as you move around. It’s one of those things you’ll notice after you’ve been treated to a glass trackpad before, and is perhaps the first thing we’d change about the Swift 5, but this is otherwise a perfectly good pad. We are also being pretty picky as it’s a very good impression of textured glass.
Its clicker feels good, the size is fine and we didn’t have any problems with misbehaving gestures or swipes.
The Swift 5 keyboard is good too. Like most thin laptops its action is reasonably shallow, but nothing like the ultra-compressed keyboards of the latest MacBooks. There’s enough give to make long-form typing comfortable, and the keys feel high-quality.
After the minor disappointment of the plastic trackpad, we’re also glad to see there’s a keyboard backlight. This makes typing in the dark much easier.
Screen
One of the highlights of the Swift 5 is something you might not notice at first glance. It has a very slender screen surround, letting Acer cram a 14in display into a frame not much bigger than that of a 13in laptop.
It’s a slightly less extreme, but very welcome, take on what Dell does with its Infinity Edge XPS displays. It marks this out as a truly modern machine, which is impressive when the price is still a key draw.
The tech behind the screen is more conventional, using an IPS panel with a glossy top layer and no touchscreen, but image quality is great for the price. It can stand up fairly well next to laptops up to £1300, including the HP Spectre 13.
Its strongest suit is contrast. At 1045:1, it’s one of the better results you’ll see from an IPS LCD screen, making its images look punchy and bold, and maximising the impact of the panel’s colour chops.
The Acer Swift 5’s screen doesn’t have an ultra-wide colour gamut, and doesn’t max out the sRGB colour standard so is technically undersaturated, but in person the results look good. It hits 81.2% of sRGB, 58.2 percent of Adobe RGB and 61 percent of DCI P3: not a Hollywood colourist’s dream machine. But to less expert eyes the contrast makes up some of the difference in terms of pure perceptual impact.
Maximum brightness is great too at 351cd/m2, so while the glossy display finish isn’t perfect for working outdoors, the backlight is powerful enough to compete with the sun
This is a very nice screen, and it has one last neat extra too. The hinge folds back fairly far, to around 140 degrees. It won’t fold flat, but does make it easier to angle the screen if end up working with the Swift 5 on your knees.
Acer Swift 5: Performance
One of the amusing traits of the Acer Swift 5 is that it’s actually faster than the more expensive Swift 7, because it uses standard Intel Core U series laptop CPUs rather than the ultra-low-voltage type so highly efficient it doesn’t need a cooling fan.
As a result, the Swift 5’s i5 and i7 versions are roughly as powerful as any laptop using these processors, including plenty of models over £1000. The ‘roughly’ bit comes into play with parts like the SSD, which is slower than some ultra-premium models. It reads at 550MB/s and writes at 390MB/s, where the fastest break 1300MB/s. Unless you’re juggling mammoth amounts of data regularly, you may not notice the difference.
The RAM is also DDR3 rather than 2133MHz DDR4, the top speed supported by the CPU.
Our review model has a Intel Core i5-7200U CPU, a dual-core chip with a 2.5GHz standard clock speed and 3.1GHz turbo boost.
It feels very responsive in general use, and can take on just about anything you like. It’ll breeze through the light Photoshopping, has the power for hobbyist video editing. In this basic performance respect, it’s comparable with 13in MacBook Pro, whose £1949 model isn’t dramatically more capable. And that uses an older processor.
You get a very good deal here. The Swift 3 scores 7424 points in Geekbench 4, and 2369 in PC Mark 8 Home, which is what we expect from a 7th Generation Core i5 laptop like this.
Don’t expect too much from its gaming abilities, though. The Swift 5 uses the Intel HD 620 GPU built into the Core i5 CPU, and while fine for older titles, it can only handle the indie games you might play on your PS4 or Xbox One, not the AAA titles.
We had to strip Alien: Isolation down to its barebones graphics settings and resolution to 720p to get a playable-ish average of 31.5fps. As you’d want to play the game, at 1080p with the effects ramped-up, the game runs at 13.6fps.
The Swift 5 struggles even more with Thief, playing at 22.7fps at 720p, min graphics. It drops to a painful 6.1fps at 1080p.
This limited gaming power is consistent among virtually all very slim and light laptops, although Apple’s MacBook Pro models are better because they have Iris graphics chips. Iris GPUs are still made by Intel, but are more powerful. You don’t see them too often in Windows machines.
The Acer Swift 3’s fan tends to start spinning even when you’re just doing light tasks. It’s certainly not silent like the Swift 7. The fan is also has small diameter, and it looks like there’s just the one, whose outlet sits on the bottom. A small diameter means relatively high-pitch fan noise, as with most ultra-slim laptops.
We didn’t find it too annoying, but it’s worth bearing in mind if fan noise gets on your nerves. The Dell XPS 13 is quieter.
Battery life
It’s a minor issue day-to-day, and is more than made up for by the great battery life. Playing a 720p video on loop at 120cd/m brightness the Acer Swift 5 lasts for 10 hours 55 minutes. That’s reasonably close to Acer’s own claim of “up to 13 hours” of use.
This is an excellent result, and is a clear sign there’s some clever power management going on behind the scenes. Pure battery capacity is very good too, though. A 53.9Wh battery is much larger than that of the 38Wh HP Spectre 13, and closer to the 60Wh of the Dell XPS 13.
This is a laptop that can comfortably get you through a day’s work as long as you don’t have to max out the brightness or do anything too CPU-taxing.
Finishing on one of the Swift 5’s few so-so elements, let’s have a look at the speakers. There’s one on the underside of each end. Comparing to our regular slightly-ageing MacBook Pro, a ‘fairly decent’ sounding laptop benchmark, the Swift 5’s speakers are reasonably loud and give a wide sound image, but the treble is a little brittle, giving off a tinny vibe. The whole sound isn’t reedy and thin, but the treble has this thin character, the impression of audio quality is at best fair.
Based on one of AMD’s latest Ryzen 7 1700X processors, the Pyro Ryzen DG delivers eight cores and a total of sixteen threads – double what you’ll get from a comparable Intel Core-i7 PC.
Based on one of AMD’s latest Ryzen 7 1700X processors, the Pyro Ryzen DG delivers eight cores and a total of sixteen threads – double what you’ll get from a comparable Intel Core-i7 PC.It also comes with a powerful Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card,
WIRED2FIRE PYRO RYZEN DG: PRICE
You can buy the Wired2Fire Pyro Ryzen DG for £1675, plus a £24 delivery charge. You can also make several adjustments to the review specs by hitting the ‘customise’ button before purchase.
Do check out our full list of the best gaming PCs before making your final choice, though.
WIRED2FIRE PYRO RYZEN DG: DESIGN AND BUILD
The first thing you’ll notice about the Wired2Fire Pyro Ryzen DG is its eye-catching black and orange NZXT H440 mid tower system case. If you can’t get past the orange, there’s a variety of other equally eye-catching options available, included a sober all-black version for the less flamboyant gamer.
Key features of the NZXT H440 include a total absence of support for optical drives (remember those?), excellent cable management and a separate lower compartment for the power supply and hard drives, which keeps the main compartment extremely neat and tidy – perfect for viewing through the transparent side panel.
Filling the case is an Asus ROG CrossHair VI Hero motherboard. There’s no cut-price B350 chipset to be seen here. Instead we get one of Asus’s premium models with all the bells and whistles of AMD’s advanced X370 chipset.
These include extra USB 3.1 ports, improved overclocking headroom and, in this case, Aura Sync RGB LED lighting control.
Perhaps more importantly, it includes multi-GPU support for both AMD CrossFireX and Nvidia SLI technologies, providing an easy upgrade path by adding a second graphics card at a later date.
But for now you’ll be getting get a single Nvidia GTX 1080 which offers plenty of performance for high quality gaming at high resolutions and immersive VR experiences.
Wired2Fire has selected AMD’s Ryzen 7 1700X 8-core processor for this PC, which is found here running at up to 3.7GHz. A Cooler Master Liquid 240 cooler is fitted with it’s huge 240mm radiator fixed to the top of the system case.
Three 120mm fans are concealed behind the blank front panel of the case, protected by a removable dust filter, as is the power supply fan below. A 140mm exhaust fan is installed at the rear keeping the PC cool without excessive noise.
The Pyro Ryzen DG combines super-fast solid state storage with the capacity of a 2TB traditional hard drive. A 250GB Samsung 960 Evo NVMe drive holds the operating system and as many games as you can fit on it, to deliver extremely fast loading times and generally snappier performance on the desktop.
WIRED2FIRE PYRO RYZEN DG: PERFORMANCE
While the 1700X may turn in some impressive results in synthetic benchmarks, the problem for Ryzen-based systems such as this one is that, at the moment, most games can’t take full advantage of those eight processor cores, favouring faster individual core speeds instead.
If you’re into processing 3D graphics or bulk editing photos, then you will love the speed of the Wired2Fire Pyro Ryzen, which can wipe the smile off the face of any Intel Core i7-7700K user when it comes to multi-core tests like Cinebench R15 where the Ryzen chip is more than 50 prercent faster.
However, this doesn’t translate into similar improvements in those all important gaming frame rates. Of course, gaming performance at decent resolutions is dominated by the graphics card, but the Wired2Fire Pyro Ryzen comes in a hair behind a similarly specced Intel-based PC in most of our benchmark tests.
Thankfully, the GeForce GTX 1080 delivers excellent frame rates for your money, with 4K gaming possible at around 60fps in High and even Ultra quality settings in some cases, although tough modern games like Deus Ex Mankind Divided are still going to knock you back to 30fps for UltraHD play. If you’re gaming on a single PC monitor though, this is likely to be all the performance you’ll need up to 2560×1440 pixels.
That’s not to say the Pyro Ryzen DG is slow, far from it, but don’t expect Ryzen to give you a better gaming experience than a high end quad-core Intel setup for now.
The Pyro Ryzen DG also delivers extremely fast storage, in the form of a 250GB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSD. These Samsung drives are dominating PC storage performance right now with speeds far in excess of SATA drives.
WIRED2FIRE PYRO RYZEN DG: WARRANTY
Wired2Fire’s 3 year warranty looks good at first glance, but note that any faulty PCs must be returned at the customer’s expense and parts are only covered for the first two years.