A flexible and powerful livingroom PC that ticks almost all the right boxes, as well as being great value.

An adequate Media Centre PC, but Asus’ competitor blows it out of the water.

Fast and good value. Gamers and power users will like it.

Very fast, but the top-end components offer poor value in the face of competition.

We’ve had some great competitors knocking on the mid-range A-Listed door, but TI’s all-rounder wins through.

Some will prefer it to TI’s system, but a few quirks see it finishing in second place.

A few quirks can’t detract from the fact that this system is fast and good value

A very fast computer with decent features at a great price, whether for gaming or an all-round powerhouse

Chunky, powerful and intimidating. Everything you want in a PC, but not what you'd want in a media centre.

Thou shall not cast the name 'Zeus' around with careless abandon, unlesseth one can backeth up claims of PC godliness.

The dual-core version of AMD's premium FX-series enters the game, and nothing can stand in its way.

Look what four grand can buy you.

A good-value and very powerful system that will appeal to those seeking ultimate performance.

The two-and-a-half thousand dollar price point is a popular one for PC systems.

Aztec’s PC is a very different take on our $4000 PC A-List challenge.

We put out the call to Australia’s white box PC manufacturers for a good high-end $4000 PC and PC Express was the first to respond.

The ASUS is one tough little cookie. Its cover and palmrest are encased in brushed aluminium lending the unit a reassuring sense of rigidity and roadworthiness. The 15.4" screen is bright, and its default resolution of 1680x1050 makes text sharp but a little small to read unless up close. The unit also comes with a built in TV-tuner, and also sports a TV-antenna output.

Housed in a fairly attractive albeit plain chassis, this machine comes shipped with performance where it counts as well as plenty of potential for the tweakers and serial upgraders. A Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor is impressive enough for a system with a price tag under $2,500, but to also include a DVD burner, TFT display, good quality 2.1 speaker set up and wireless keyboard and mouse combo is previously unheard of.

Physically similar to the Scorpion Z-Box system with its black anodised midi tower, this unit also features a pair of both front-mounted audio 3.5mm sockets and USB ports, perfect for quick plug and play of both bus and externally powered devices such as keyboards, printers, joysticks and removable USB pen drives.

While the epithet 'multimedia PC' used to be bandied about to over-hype any PC in the mid-'90's that was capable of playing music, rudimentary video, and games, the descriptive was overused so much on sub-par PCs that the impact of any real multimedia capabilities was diminished in the wash of pretenders.