Acer has sacrificed overall power in favour of features with this moderate little system. Its a little behind most of the other servers in terms of hardware (with the exception of CelestixTaurus), with a noticeably slower P4 1.7GHz CPU.

Like both the Dell and Emagen systems, the Acer comes with two hard-drives working as a RAID array.The Acer curiously came configured with its disks operating in striped RAID, which boosts speed, but means you dont get the redundancy of RAID 1.

Most administrators are much more concerned about maintaining integrity than gaining a little performance and therefore run a server in mirrored RAID configuration so that a backup is created using the second drive. Of course, you can reconfigure if needs be.

The Acer is a very similar system to the Dell PowerEdge 600SC in that both use ServerWorks GC-SL chipsets, and their custom motherboards have almost identical features and layouts. The Altos falls behind the Dell by a large margin when it comes to one attribute: it has a much slower CPU: a 1.7GHz P4 compared to the Dells 2.4GHz processor.

The Altos G300 also weighs in rather heavily in the price stakes due to the inclusion of Windows 2000 Server. At $4,999 its the most expensive of the systems we tested, but its also the only system to feature this server-optimised operating system. If higher-end server functionality is what youre looking for then this operating system if the one to choose, at least until .NET comes out.

Like a couple of the other systems here, the Acers 64-bit PCI slots only run at 33MHz, which is somewhat disappointing and prevents you from getting the full performance out of high-end peripherals. Moreover, it only comes with a single NIC. It is Gigabit, but its a little annoying if you want to use your server to share a broadband Internet connection as well.

If you need a cheap system with Windows 2000 Server, then the Altos G300 has enough grunt to easily handle a workgroup of 20 to 30 users. On the other hand, the Dell is more powerful, and similarly coupled with a 5-CAL license copy of Server 2000 could also be had for under $5,000.