We a were a little non-plussed on finding out the specs weren’t as ‘Ultimate’ or ‘Zeus’-like as ‘implied’ by the title.

Two last-generation, mid-range 6800 GS graphics cards run together in SLI. As we saw last month, there two times when SLI becomes relevant.

It’s a great upgrade path in that you buy a second card when yours starts feeling slow. The other time is when the highest card in the range isn’t powerful enough for you - something that only affects very rich, very hardcore gamers who want to play the latest games at the highest resolutions with the largest number of effects and quality settings enabled. While two 6800 GS cards are not to be sniffed at, a single 7900 GT (see A-List) would cost less, offer better performance, and leave a free graphics card slot for a future upgrade.

It would also make the system quieter. There are no case fans in the cavernous Xsonic 1020-6b Black X-Case and the CPU cooler isn’t particularly loud. But the graphics card fans provided an audible constant drone (one was actually twice as loud as the other).

That said, the ‘Zeus’ is a capable gaming performer. At 1280 x 1024 it aced all of our game benchmarks which use strenuous 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering:- Far Cry scored 63.6fps, Half-Life2 63.6fps and Call of Duty 2 managed 34.6fps. At 1600 x 1200 Half-Life 2 and Far Cry dropped only to 58fps but Call of Duty 2 dropped to 22.5fps – an indication it will struggle with the latest games at this resolution. In this last test a single 7900 GT managed 27fps on our test rig.

Still, we like the inclusion of 2GB of RAM as newer games are starting to make use of this amount. The single-core Athlon 64 3500+ processor is adequate for gamers but is unspectacular for a two grand case-only system. The final major component is a 200GB WD hard disk.

All combined to create a decent score of 0.96 in our benchmarks – just four percent slower than our reference dual core desktop system.

Other features include an excellent dual-layer DVD writer which also writes DVD-RAM and we like the inclusion of a second drive for disc-to-disc copying and other-region movie watching. There’s also a decent floppy drive / card reader at the front.

Beyond these the main feature is the monster case itself. The motherboard looks tiny inside and there’s plenty of room for future upgrading:- two spare hard disk bays and three spare 5.25in drive bays. However, you must physically pull down the drive bay covers to reach the eject buttons on the optical drives. There’s also an array of flashing blue LEDs at the front with a speed control dial (which also turns them off). They lend the system a powerful presence - until you get sick of them.

Connectivity options are modest. The case offers two, top-mounted USB 2 ports and audio jacks (unfortunately the FireWire socket isn’t supported by the motherboard). At the back are another four USB 2 connectors, three audio jacks (for 5.1 audio). There’s also Gigabit Ethernet, parallel, serial and coaxial S/PDIF out.

GameDude offers Windows XP installation as an option – we recommend buyers use it. The warranty is disappointing for the price at one year RTB. We can’t shake the feeling that the price is too high – our A-Listed value PC could easily be upgraded to offer similar performance and price, but would still leave you with a 17-inch LCD, keyboard mouse, speakers. As such we can’t recommend the Zeus.