Last month, HP disproved the theory that a business-oriented workstation was just an excuse to charge more for a regular PC (March 2006, page 76). With consumer PCs these days being as fast as the supercomputers of yesteryear, are dedicated workstations still relevant? Coming in at over $4200 Labs-newcomers Ipex's AllStation X puts it up against some very high end consumer PCs and so we expected a great deal.

A first glance at the specs, is promising. There's 2GB of DDR 2 RAM and two superfast, 10,000rpm 75GB WD Raptors running in RAID0+1 (with Intel Matrix mirroring). The Processor is a dual core 3.2GHz Pentium D 840 - as used in our benchmarks' reference PC. But, after pounding through our benchmarks, the system came in at four percent slower than our reference PC. Certainly it's fast for many applications, but we've now seen many notebooks that can easily match or beat it.

Last month's HP xw9300 Workstation also sported dual NVIDIA Quadro FX 3400 SLI cards running in SLI. While it cost almost $13,000 graphics professionals still require the performance and customisation levels that dedicated workstation graphics chips provide, so it was disappointing to see only a consumer ATI Radeon X700 card included - this is last-generation consumer performance. While this is no machine for gaming, benchmark scores of under 20fps in our standard 3D benchmarks conclusively state that this is no 3D workstation.

But there certainly can be more to workstations than simply performance and you only have to look at the AllStation X to see how else it differs. The custom case includes a mounting for the LCD monitor. This reduces the footprint to just 20cm all in. But a business computer also needs to be easily accessible to onsite engineers - as Dell's GX620 range (October 2005, page 56) and HP's dx5150 (March 2006, page 77) in Labs recent offerings illustrate. You need to unscrew four tiny screws to access the AllStation's innards at the back and then give some serious thought how you're going to upgrade the embedded components. There are no tool-less quick release slots here. And upgrading space is limited. While there are two memory slots left for increasing the 2GB of RAM, the PCI slots are all low profile - limiting graphics card upgrades and general upgradeability significantly. There's no room to improve the 120GB of hard disk space.

Still, at least a speedy dual layer DVD writer is included (though there's no room for another). Six USB 2, Serial and Parallel ports are included on the left hand side and a further two USB 2, two audio jacks and a FireWire port are at the front on the bottom.

Ipex claims whisper quiet operation though its power-on roar is one of the loudest we've heard. Fortunately, this fan quickly silences when idling though it gets distractingly loud again when under load. In use the main noise comes from occasional hard disk clicking which sounds rather like a coffee percolator. It wasn't distracting though. The whole system case feels hot most of the time but it seems to act as one large heatsink and we witnessed no stability issues.

Other disappointments are the keyboard and mouse which are simply rebadged bottom-of-the-range Logitech wireless offerings - we'd expect a laser-quality mouse at least for this money.

The LCD monitor included on our review unit was an Ipex-branded 19in unit though the company will attach anything you require. The review unit didn't have the fastest response time (its specs are unstated) meaning lag was noticeable around moving objects - though not to a particularly distracting degree. But colours were displayed well. Just note that some power users will feel limited by the 1280 x 1024 resolution. If you want to quickly adjust the monitor only tilt is available. If you want to raise the height you have to physically pick it up and pull it off the mounting brackets which work in a similar way to wardrobe shelves. While inelegant the degree of movement is generous. Just hope the user doesn't drop it when doing this.

The obvious customisation of the case is what stands out about this system but we're still not convinced it's worth it. Dell's Optiplex GX620 USFF has a smaller footprint when mounted on the back of the monitor although it lacks the power. Even so, we can see few people desperate enough to pay such a premium for a relatively modest system just because they want a small footprint.

In terms of service the three years RTB offering pails in the light of HP and Dell's Next Business Day onsite offerings. Other features like a Trusted Platform Module for secure encryption and Intel's comprehensive remote management system are all available with Dell's OptiPlex range. The OptiPlex's also offer a great variety in physical size and cost half the price of the AllStation.

Unfortunately the only benefit we can see of the AllStation is that it's the first small business-oriented PC to offer a dual core processor. However, it still underperforms for the price and the likes of HP and Dell offer better-value alternatives.