Labs

The AT-FX Redline comes in a case that'll certainly turn heads. Inside, there's a GeForce 8800 GTS card with 640MB of its own RAM, rather than the 320MB more commonly used. This gives it extra clout when running games at the 1,680 x 1,050 pixel resolution of a 22-inch TFT screen. You get a hefty processor, too - the Core 2 Duo E6750 is a new high-end model from Intel, and amazingly fast.

Interestingly, the motherboard can take both today's DDR2 memory modules and the next-generation

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DDR3. It'll throw a wobbly if you use both together, and at the moment DDR3 is prohibitively expensive for little extra speed. But that'll change by the end of next year, so there's an interesting upgrade path here.

There were two main issues with this system: the speakers, which were to impressive audio what Baldrick is to Cordon Bleu, and the poor display. The foibles of the screen are less immediately obvious, but more serious. For a start, the Yuraku MABWBA TFT flip-flopped forward and back in its stand in an alarmingly cheap way. The real problem, though, was image quality. To get a nice inky black we had to lower the brightness to around 38% and the contrast to 78%. This removed the bleached-out appearance but left us with an image that lacked impact and vibrancy. We also ended up dropping the green level to around 42% to remove the green bias, but nothing could compensate for the poor viewing angles, which make colours distort or invert as soon as you move from square-on to the screen.

The one-year return to base warranty is also unimpressive.