In an unusual combination of styles, DigitalStar has used a silver Cooler Master Centurion full size ATX case, but coupled this with a black optical drive and floppy disk drive. If you're finicky about that sort of thing, there are additional face plates available that attach to the front to keep the colours consistent.

We were surprised to see so many Prescott chips in machines for a sub-$2,000 price tag; the IntelliPro directly competes with the other two submitted Prescott systems, performing highest in two of the three tests. It was pipped by Acer's T310 in 3DMark2001SE by nearly 2,000 3DMarks, care of the Aspire's RADEON 9800 PRO graphics, once again proving ATI the graphics card crown holder for performance.

Included is a multi-format 4x DVD burner, which is great for personal data archiving or burning those home movies and precious moments into a standardised and shareable format. This goes hand in hand with the 120GB hard disk drive. Given the enormous storage strains imposed by DV capture and editing, this drive will give you plenty of room for movie making and still leave enough room for all your favourite apps to be installed. The Centurion features a single front-mounted six-pin FireWire connection; while the GA-8S655FX Ultra has its own rear single four and six-pin FireWire inputs as well as a single optical out and RCA socket. Although shipping with only a two speaker Altec Lansing system, the motherboard does offer integrated five channel audio decoding, with three rear 3.5mm plugs one each for front and rear left and right and a third for the centre channel. The software bundle includes a copy of PowerDVD and Sonic MyDVD, which is enough to create and playback discs created with your DVD writer.

NVIDIA's cooler on its GeForce FX 5700 model isn't the quietest we've heard. Under 3D load we noticed a fair bit of noise emanating from the chassis -- although it's far from unbearable. Rounding off the package is a 17in LG LCD monitor -- a very decent addition.

The whole package offers great value for money and is well worth a look-in for both home entertainment, media creation and gamers after a new rig.