The case stopped many Labs visitors in their tracks. Some liked it, others hated it you decide. It’s not noisy, with only the CPU cooler and an 80mm exhaust fan whirring away constantly we’ve heard quieter but it is unobtrusive.

We were slightly surprised to see only an Athlon 3000+ powering it PC Express offered a 3700+. However, the amount of RAM is doubled to 1GB and the 6600GT is Leadtek’s higher-clocked Extreme version. The hard disk is a respectable 160GB.

Two spare DIMM sockets exist should you want to add even more memory, and three 5.25in bays are free. A floppy drive occupies the external 3.5in slot and there’s space for three more hard disks on the inside. Another upgrade path is the SLI motherboard if your graphics power ever feels limiting you can add a second.

Connectivity is good, with glaring omissions. On top of Gigabit Ethernet are six USB 2 ports (two more at the front) and three full size FireWire ports courtesy of a PCI card. 5.1 audio is included as are coaxial S/PDIF in and out ports, parallel and serial.

The only minor gripe we had was that only one optical drive was included, though this was an excellent LG multi DVD-writer which offers 16x DVD+R, 4x DVD+R9 dual layer and 5x DVD-RAM burning. Many will have an old second drive around for disc-to-disc copying or multi-region DVDs

Despite the CPU, it still managed a respectable score of 0.85 in our benchmarks. The lack of dual-core holds it back for multitasking but it will still get the job done unless you’re doing constant encoding. Scoring comfortably over 30fps in both our game benchmarks shows it can play most current games (though it will struggle with powerful effects like HDR).

So far it’s neck and neck with PC Express. Differentiation comes from the peripherals. The keyboard and mouse are certainly much better being Logitech’s Internet Pro set. The 2.1 speakers are acceptable for undemanding users who won’t miss the lack of punchy bass in games, video and music. Furthermore, they get quite loud too.

The CMV display didn’t suffer in any of our real world tests the 8ms response time suffered minimal ghosting. It also did very well in our DisplayMate technical assault course, with blending in particular being very good. However, it struggled with extreme light and dark shades meaning you could lose detail in some areas.

The warranty is a modest 1-year RTB and software consists mainly of titles bundled The warranty is a modest 1-year RTB and software consists mainly of titles bundled with hardware and some judiciously-chosen shareware and freeware like Anti-Virus Guard and OpenOffice. It all amounts to a strong system and, unlike previous submissions, offers no obvious weak point. With that in mind we’re happy to declare it our value PC of choice.