Baddog is new to PC Authority. The company promises to offer something out of the ordinary and a quick glance at the airbrushed, high-end PCs on its website shows this. Here is its LanBox, a customised, medium form factor PC with a handle on the front to carry it around.
The specification is customisable via the website but ours came with a low-specified single core, 2.2GHz Athlon 64 3700+ processor, 1GB of RAM and two 80GB hard disks running in RAID 0. The latter helped push the 3700+ to a 2D benchmark score of 1.03 – just faster than our speedy reference system. Also included is an overclocked eVGA 7600 GT (600MHz core clock and 780MHz memory clock). This is a very respectable performer at resolutions of 1280 x 1024: in our medium Far Cry test with HDR it averaged a decent 41.9fps. In Call of Duty 2 it managed 29.9fps.
Standard PC users may feel limited by the lack of dual-core and hard disk size but we feel it hits just the right combination of parts to function as a travelling games machine. Our main gripe is noise - an above-average drone from the case and CPU fans.
The small case limits expandability somewhat but there’s still room for a second optical drive to complement the dual-layer DVD writer. There’s also room for a second graphics card and a PCI slot. There’s no more room for hard disks though. Connectivity is good at the back with six audio jacks, Gigabit Ethernet, Fire-Wire, four USB ports, serial, parallel and optical and coaxial S/PDIF out.
We’re fans of the customer care BadDog is offering. The system comes with a personalized folder with laminated pages, recovery disks and plenty of support information. The warranty is an outstanding three years onsite, next business day.
This all goes to make an otherwise expensive $1819 price tag easier to swallow. If you want to buy a special PC from a company that puts in that bit more effort, BadDog’s LanBox is a decent choice.
