As far as performance is concerned, the Emagen Lightspeed XPS is a fairly competitive offering. It sits in the middle of the pack as far as price is concerned, but managed to sit at second to third place in most benchmarks - it even came top of the class in 3DMark05. The 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 certainly helped there. And the fact that it’s $600 cheaper than the Pioneer system also works in its favour.

One area which required a bit of attention was the build quality - it was the least consistent of all the offerings. The case itself is beautiful – brushed aluminium and tough – but the front mounted i/o port cover is a weak point. It looks smart but it makes a small, but irritating, metal on metal sound when opened.

The main problem with this unit, though, is the internals. They are a nightmare: cables were looped around struts in the case and were even tight against the heatsink and fan. The leftover power cables were bunched at top, and almost fully obstructed the blowhole. There was some attempt at sleeving the drive cables to help airflow, but any small benefit this would have had was negated by the untidiness elsewhere.

For those looking to upgrade, the motherboard only offers 3 PCI slots – and one is already used by the DTV tuner – but there is room to add an extra SATA drive for a RAID setup if extra performance is required. There are also an extra 2 RAM slots available.

Negatives aside, the Emagen managed to perform quite well. Its score of 3634 marks in 3DMark05 beat our Labs winner by a fairly convincing 600 marks. This is a very intensive test, and really stresses today’s components, so this is a fair testament to the Emagen’s abilities. It also managed second place in the FarCry tests, getting 83.36 in the FarCry Bunker test. There was only 1.6 fps separating it from the Modtech system. Also very good.
Features wise, the Emagen came in at final place – with a very minimal software bundle, onboard sound, a 17” LCD where competitors offered 19”, and only a single optical drive.

With a little more attention to detail, the Emagen could make a very good system, but even so it may still appeal to power gamers who are looking for a good bang for buck.