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.

Scoring only marginally lower results in 3Dmark01 than PC Quest’s Ariadne system with a RADEON 9600XT graphics adaptor, this machine has plenty of grunt out of the box, just the way we like our budget PCs.

Although not yet a staple part of our benchmarking suite, in PCmark04 this box showed very positive results over the other three systems we ran it on this month – it blitzed the others by as much as 371 overall marks, even given their higher specs.

In the spec and layout departments however, this unit really shines, not only featuring six rear-mounted USB ports to its two front mounted, but three FireWire ports, two six-pin connections one on each the front and back of the chassis, but also a four-pin connection, perfect for DV cam connectivity.

Included in the machine is a single format DVD burner hidden behind an optical bay stealth cover, giving it the slick appearance of having no drives. This extends down a further three bays, although there are only two stealth faceplaces supplied on the case, you’re capable of physically installing four optical drives, and a big total of four 3in drives.
Emagen has made good use of cooling, by using both a heat extracting pipe which leads out a ventilation hole in the left hand side of the chassis, and also including a rear mounted 80mm fan. A well presented cable layout and management system should keep it nice and cool, while the lock on the side panel will keep your insides safe from prying eyes.

All in all, this is a solid performing, easy to look at PC with plenty of features. Well worth checking out if you’re in the market for a powerful but inexpensive system for gaming, PVR usage or for office usage.