the new Aldi Pc
 

up for sale on April 1st - lol

http://www.aldi-stores.co.uk/specials_01_11/1.html

- can read smart cards....

- has scart output 'so you can copy dvd to videotape' - providing you own the copyright.........

pretty good 'bang per buck' ?

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

There was a leaflet for that in the paper today.

£749.99

From what I can remember, the specs were something like:

P4 3GHz (with Hyper-Threading, whatever that is??)

512Megs DDR RAM (not sure what speed)

200gig HDD

Pioneer DVD/CD writer: DVD+/-R & +/-RW, CDR, CDRW

DVD-ROM drive

Smart card / memory card reader thing (CF, MMC, SD, etc)

Radeon 9800 (not sure exactly which type)

TV Tuner with FM Radio, & Remote Control

Cordless keyboard & mouse

Built-in ethernet port

Wireless-G adaptor

SCART output rather than just normal SVideo / Composite Video TV-Out

USB2 ports on front & rear (unsure how many)

Firewire ports


There may have been more...


Does sound quite good (well, to me anyway)

EDIT: I've just looked at the flash thing. It says the RAM is "400MHz 64bit dual channel DDR RAM", while the Radeon 9800 is a 9800 "XXL" (?)

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

i smell an april fool.........

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

seems fairly reasnoble to me for its price, the cpu its got is now getting on for a year old. and is dirt cheap now rest of the stuff is fairly modern, looks like they call the graphics 9800 xxt, which is probably a spin on the cut down 9800se, then again i've seen plain 9800's for around the £125 mark recently.
The main cost which isnt included is a moniter ! CRT's are in the £100-200 band extra, and tft's are £100 + more like £300-400 for a good 17" and £500+ for a 19" tft.
Also how can it be an april fool if they've promo'd it now and its not april yet
:rollseyes:

K

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

some of the features and the price is too cheap......... unless its real :Yikes: :D

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

im sure the advertising standards agency would have something to say about it if it was an april fool

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

It is not an April fool.

I bought the 2Mhz version of the Medion from Aldi a year ago - never a moments problem. Nice machine, seems well bulit/ thought out. Occasionally throws up an odd error message (the rare/ unusual ones) in German rather than English - some reflection of the source heritage I guess but not a problem.

Anyone buying can expect LONG queues outside the store. They open at 9.00 but I arrived at 6.30 am and by 7 am there were 10 in the queue. By 7.30 there were 20 - and they only had 15 machines (*) By 9 am there were 50+ in the queue.

(*) Seem better organised these days. My local Aldi store now issues numbered tickets to those in the queue and when the machines are all gone then you can order at the same price. I am told it takes about 2 weeks for delivery.

Note - Aldi does not accept credit cards ie Mastercard/ Visa etc. but they will take cash cards ie Switch - or money or course.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

my bro in law got one of the aldi machines and it has been spot on from day one , tbh i dont think you can go far wrong with them :)

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Cool.

The offer is v tempting, but would mean taking time off work to trek to the Aldi store at the outskirts of Cambridge & queue up in hope of getting one.

Pity you can't just order online.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

reread snodvans post , it looks as though you can still buy at the shop price even when they have all been sold :)

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Ah. Does seem like that, cool :)

Although it looks like you still have to go there in person.

Hmm. I think I may take Thursday morning off...

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

you might want to take your sleeping bag by the sound of it , good luck :D :D :D

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

A couple of very favourable reviews of previous Aldi Medion PCs:

Medion Titanium MD XL

Medion Titanium 8080 XL (The 8080 is from late last year, & sounds v similar to next week's Aldi PC, apart from a smaller HDD.)

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Thanks Tez :)

I've got the leaflet for the new one in front of me, it certainly looks spiffy, another difference from the 8080 XL is the DVD writer is an 8x +R/-R by Pioneer.

All the hits I got on googling 9800xxl were mainly German - none at all in the UK ?

Might be worth mentioning, in the same leaflet, on sale the same day, a 17" TFT monitor for £269.99 . :)

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

We have still got a Medion from year 2000 thats still working as good as ever, even though the kids now own it! The one occasion I called the helpline, they phoned me back and talked me through whatever it was. I can't vouch for the help you might get now, but I would buy one of these over many bigger brand names.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

on previous deals they've allowed you to place an order on paper if you get there and all the PCs have gone.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

at that price they can forget it build your own get the parts from the usa except for tower case what you pay over here for you get it at half price over there. I am in the process of building a new pc and the specs of mine compared to aldi will make that look crap example pc 3700 ddr 400mhz 1gig price in usa 81quid over here 70 quid for 512 speaks for itself

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

another good reason is forget the credit card reader all it needs is your kids who know how to online shop yikes not a chance

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Yeah, it does look quite good :)

LOL, all I've found are German links too.

Using "translate" in Google wasn't a lot of help. I might try & do an advanced Google search for just English language sites.

Yep, the TFT monitor sounds pretty good. I could do with a new monitor too, but I think I'll have a look around first.

One thing I'm not sure about with TFT monitors is stuff like pixel burn & dead pixels...

Cool. Good to know their reliability & support etc is good :)


Yeah, I've read that too. V good :)

It would be pretty bloody annoying to queue up & then not get one as they've sold out!

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Now add import duty and a shed load of postage.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

importy depends on what the seller sends it as but u might ask nicely for it to be sent not being worth as much as it is .This is of course against ebay rules but cannot be inforced not unless ebay has a employee with every seller in the usa for veryday and of couse theres thousands of them . And as for postage the dollars is about 1.9 dollars for the pound .Its cheaper even with postage .Out of about 40 iteims ive got from the usa about 5 have been clobbered by customs and even with them charge its still cheaper . I can even quote you on memory ddr 400 motherboard cpu dvd writer .If you bought a 8x dvd writer and i said i bought it for under 50 quid you would say where was it nicked from as cheap as $70 .But whe its sent over here it might say on customs invoice worth 20 bucks now are customs going to open every iteim sent into this country and then iteims might be 2 moths before you get them due to the backlog i think not lol

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

;) if theres a way theres a means

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

I think I'd much rather buy stuff from the UK and have a reasonable chance of getting it replaced should it go wrong.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Well, I got one :)


Got to Aldi at 1/4 to 9 this morning. Was going to try & get there earlier, but overslept, lol.

There was already a queue of around 20 people when I turned up, & most of them bought one of these PCs.

Set-up was easy, build quality seems v good, & it is so much quieter (& faster!) than my crappy old machine.

V impressed so far :)

And apparently the "Radeon 9800XXL" is a 9800XT (well, that's what the display adaptor properties say).

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Well done m8, give us a road test in a couple of days, should be good, they usually get a good write up.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Will do m8.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Nice one Tez :) - I went in our Aldi this evening ( not to buy a pc ;) ) and all the computers & scanners had sold out, just a few tft monitors & wireless keyboards/mice, left.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

If you still need a translation of the German site, post a link, and I'll see what I can do. I can't promise anything but I do speak a fair bit of German (don't know how I'll get along on the techno babble though :erm: )

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

I bought A Gericom 3.05 P4 laptop from Aldi about a month ago. 60G HD, 15" TFT (1400x1050 - nice) CD/DVD R/RW and loads of ports, wireless card etc. Price of £1K included 2 years warranty AND all risks insurance. Seems good. Nice & quiet. Negatives ... battery lasts just about 2.25 hrs with that sort of power. Not a lot but then I am rarely far from a power source. Not the lightest of machines (understatement) esp if you consider the mains adaptor is like half a brick.

Needed to call Gericom 'helpline' (nothing serious, my fault RTFM!!) and they were amazingly helpful. Presume the call is to Germany (but somehow is charged local rate) by the accent of the guy who responded INSTANTLY. Very pleasant guy. Did not call me a twit (which I deserved) and we even had a small chat about whether I 'liked the machine etc etc". Makes a change.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

that's useful to know, danielf, thanks :tu:

Have you looked at this

http://download.medion.de/medion/uni...dom/index.html

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Apparently, there is a German site that claims to have benchmarks for the Radeon 9800 XXL which show it be comparable to the Radeon 9800 Pro.

The Radeon 9800XXL scores 6075 points in 3DMark03 and 17143 points in 3DMark 200 on a 3GHz Pentium 4-system

Does that make sense?

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

wow - does it really run 'native' at 1400x1050, 1280 horizontal does for me & I have a 37cm (14.5") horizontal width, yours must be less than 33cm (13"), what's it like on brightness & refresh? :)

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

perfect sense :)

if it reports an XT variant of the Radeon 9800 series to the system, it may even be better than a 'pro'

http://apps.ati.com/ATIcompare/result.asp

:cool:

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Are the Medions from Aldi the same manufacturer as sold by PC World? I have a Medion laptop, and recently bought an Advent laptop as well. They use the same power supply.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

The 1400x1050 is "as it comes" from the box and I have not changed anything. Actual screen width is 30.5 cm (12") height 23cm (9") and diagonal 38cm (15").

Brightness - well all I can say is that I turn the brightness down from the default setting. Refresh? Dunno how to judge that. I use the machine for downloading from video camera and then editing etc. There does not seem to be any problem.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

:cool: - I mainly use mine for browsing the net & watching tv via an ATI 9800se AIW card, mine is way behind an XT 'monster', for games, but the TV, CD, Mpeg, Avi, DVD playback is great. - Interesting that in the Aldi machine, the TV etc appears to be done by a 3rd party card?

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

There's quite a thriving thread on the WhatLaptop site on problems with Median Laptops. The main problem appears to be overheating.Toys 'R Us are selling Median laptops for £999..q uite a good spec too..if only they worked properly. Staples I believe are also selling them too.

Just hope Aldi's Median PCs are OK. It will be very interesting to hear from buyers.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

The Medion runs quite hot, but its OK as long as you use a flat surface so it has an airgap underneath.
My Advent with the same power supply as the Medion only runs hot when re-charging, as its a Centrino Mobile chip it tends to run cooler anyway. Its battery life is more than double the Medion.

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

aargh - sorry prop, ignore my comments, mines a desktop, your point about the gap underneath is so true, though :tu:

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

Yeah, i saw an advert for the Aldi laptop a while ago in the paper - and it looked the same as a laptop i bought from novatech, v. similar spec too. And yeah the temperature is fine as long as it has sufficient air circulation beneath it...;)

Re: the new Aldi Pc
 

I'm not surprised. The one near me was a bit of a madhouse, & that was straight after opening.

I was tempted to get the TFT monitor too, but couldn't really find any info about it so decided not to.

Cheers :)

I've already tried using Google's "translate" function though. A bit odd, but fairly understandable, lol.

Yeah, guess so.

One of the German links I got Google to translate said the "9800 XL" was somewhere between a 9800 & a 9800 Pro, while another said that the "9800 XXL" (the one on the new Aldi PC I bought) was somewhere between the 9800 Pro & XT.


Yeah, the manual says it's a seperate Medion branded "combi card", with TV/FM tuner plus 56k modem on one card.


Well, it's v good so far, IMO. Still need to try out all the features though.