Core 2 hasn’t simply affected PC speeds, the prices of PCs in general have plummeted. Our previously A-Listed mid-range PC cost $2499, had a dual core AMD X2 4200+ CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 7900 GT graphics card.

Pacstar’s new DuoElite sports one of Intel’s lower-end 1.86GHz Core 2 processors with 2MB of level 2 cache, 2GB of RAM and a top-end X1900 XT graphics card – impressive. It also sports two 250GB hard disks running in RAID 0. Our only gripe is, as with Altech, the RAM is not the full speed PC2-6400 but rather the PC2-5300.

Even so, it still flew through our benchmarks. But a score of 1.13 is still only 3% faster than TI’s AMD X2 4200 system. Few people will be griping though, not least because of the inclusion of our top-end-graphics-card-of-choice, the Radeon X1900 XT. This tore through our high-end, 1600 x 1200 3D benchmarks.

It averaged 42fps in Far Cry with HDR turned on and 34.6fps in Call of Duty with 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering turned on. So it will play all of the latest games. And games look good on the 19-inch widescreen Chimei LCD. It’s the same one as Pacstar’s value system (see A-List). Colours are strong and the desktop is clear. Letters in Word might not be as crystal-clear as we’ve seen elsewhere, but it’s still perfectly useable. We weren’t distracted by lag when gaming or watching films, thanks to the 8ms response time.

The only physical weak points are the keyboard and mouse. Both essentially work fine but they do feel cheap and plasticy.

In terms of expandability, there’s room for two more hard disks, a floppy drive and three more 5.25-inch drives. The included DVD writer is a useful all format drive which supports dual-layer DVD writing and DVD-RAM discs, but we always like to see a second drive to facilitate disc to disc copying.

Pacstar’s choice of motherboard is rather odd. It’s an unusually low-specified 965 board from Intel. It has no RAID controller so the hard disks connect to a PCI RAID card. This will undoubtedly limit burst speed (and probably affected our benchmarks) as even an unsaturated PCI bus will act as a bottleneck to all the information coming from two crunching hard disks.

Connectivity options aren’t bad though with three audio jacks, six USB 2 ports, FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet at the back and two USB 2 ports at the front. We like Windows XP Pro being included and the noise is a constant, unobtrusive whirr.

The warranty is a modest two years parts (three labour) RTB but considering this and the odd motherboard, it’s a fast system by most people’s standards and is good value.