Very narrowly pipped for the top placing Labs winner award this month, Plus offers an impressive performing gaming machine with all the bells and whistles you'd expect to find at this price point. Wrapped in the attractive Cooler Master Cavalier wave housing, there's no ultra portability to be found here. The clear advantage of moving away from small form factor housing is not being starved for space internally. This case has provision for not only the two optical drives included with the system, but space for two more five inch devices and three additional hard disk drives on top of the pair already inside. Unfortunately the ASUS AV8 Deluxe motherboard chosen only features support for two SATA drives and PATA RAID, making hard disk upgradeability a little restricted for high storage capacity users. Performance is catered for with the two disk 10,000rpm RAID stripe, but unfortunately your only storage expansion method is to either replace both SATA drives or add PATA devices. Although holding a commanding position in 3DMark01SE, the Altera dropped back to fourth place in 3DMark05 and clawed back to middle of the pack with four samples of full scene anti-aliasing enabled. Further jostling for top ranking places, the Pluscorp system dropped back a little in both Doom 3 and FarCry tests with only Bunker with 4xAA showing its real worth.

We were surprised to see Plus narrowly pipped at the post for the winning title given its performance oriented AMD 64 FX-55 CPU and X800XT Platinum Edition. It did however excel in the feature department, with an Audigy soundcard, six channel speaker set and a good software bundle boasting several recent games to put your system through a good workout. Almost identically kitted out to the Labs winning Modtech system, the real differentiating factor between the two was choice to graphics card, the 6800 Ultra just having that little bit of extra oomph to get it across the line.

Given we didn't impose a price cap on this month's roundup barring the minimum cost of $3000, Plus really came through with a corker of a system. Unfortunately in the end Modtech's combination of slightly slower CPU but 6800 Ultra ultimately got it into first place. For gamers after top shelf gaming performance with a decent feature set for both current and next generation games, this is definitely hard to look past.