The CWS SuperPro S3 has some very nice components under the hood: its equipped with the fastest Athlon XP in this months crop (a 2100+), 512MB of PC2100 DDR and an 80GB HDD.

The SuperPro also uses practically the same motherboard as our top performer, the Emagen Essentia. It even managed to beat the Essentia in all three SYSmark2002 scores by a small margin, primarily thanks to an extra 256MB of RAM and faster CPU.

The SuperPro stumbles a bit in 3D benchmarks, as it comes with the slowest GeForce4 available: an MX420. While not exactly sluggish (its a Leadtek card, so it still has the goods with 3DMark2001 scores of about 4,500), it certainly cant compete with the GeForce4 Ti4200, or even the MX440 both cards of choice for many other systems this month.

The SuperPros GA-7VRX motherboard is slightly paired down compared to the Essentias GA-7VRXP.

The XP version comes with two distinct advantages: RAID and ATA/133 IDE ports plus an onboard Ethernet port. The SuperPro isnt quite as upgradeable due to this, and moreover its network card takes up one of your PCI slots.

Curiously, despite the fact that it supports four USB 2.0 ports, the motherboard connectors were going completely unused.

Included with the SuperPro is a paired down version of the Creative Inspire surround speakers also seen with the Altech system. These are pretty much identical to the Altech set,
but with two satellites instead of four. The subwoofer is a little underpowered when compared with the Altec Lansing and Viewmaster 2.1 sets, but overall the set is still quite capable provided you dont crank the volume up too high.

It also comes with the same no-frills, beige case as the Altech. This works well, with a nice open interior, but its strictly functional, and rather plain.

The SuperPro S3 is a competent and capable system its main flaw is its graphics card, and this still offers decent performance compared to the integrated options.