All of this month’s value PCs offer something different but we found both TI's and Dell’s systems wanting in at least one area. A quick glance at Pacstar’s spec sheet and the system itself made us think that here is a real contender.

The first thing you notice is the 19in 1440 x 900 widescreen LCD which offers an 8ms response time. Not being familiar with Chimei we expected budget performance at this price, but we were impressed. It may not be the sharpest LCD we’ve seen but the desktop is clear and playing Far Cry on it looked great – we weren’t distracted by any lag. The resolution means you can have two office documents open side by side. It has inbuilt speakers which unsurprisingly lack bass, but are otherwise adequate. Our only gripe is the fiddly menu system which makes it tricky to adjust volume.

The PC itself looks pretty good. Behind the front drive bays and connectors is space for four 5.25in drives (one is taken up by a dual-layer DVD writer and a media card reader, which supports all formats but xD). There’s only one USB connector though, and no audio jacks. The keyboard and mouse are plasticy and mediocre, but they work.

While there’s no dual-core CPU the Athlon 64 3700+ combined with 1GB of Corsair TWINX memory and the 300GB Seagate 7200.9 hard disk produce an impressive score of 0.97 – just three percent behind our high-performance reference PC. It can’t match the 2D grunt of TI’s AM2-based system though. However, it leaps ahead in 3D performance. Pacstar bundles an overclocked 7600 GT graphics card which averaged an impressive 44fps in Far Cry and 30.3fps in Call of Duty 2 at our medium settings. Between the TI Deluxe M2 1500 and the Dell Dimension 3100, it’s the only system that will play the latest games.

Inside, there’s space for three more hard disks, three PCI cards, two 1x PCI-Express cards and two DIMMs. At the back, connectivity options include 7.1 audio, coaxial S/PDIF, parallel and Gigabit Ethernet connectors. FireWire is an unfortunate omission but four USB ports are included. You can hear the cooling fans, but it’s not a noisy distraction.

Pacstar offers a poor-in-comparison one-year RTB warranty though this can be upgraded to three-years onsite for just $150. All in all, while not perfect, Pacstar’s system is the best ‘value PC’ we’ve seen. This system offers a decent-sized hard disk, 2D grunt and gaming ability too – not to mention the widescreen 19in LCD. It rightly takes its place on the A-List.