Labs

The most striking feature of the Eclipse, as you've seen on our cover, is its deliciously moody case. The glossy black outer shell, with its wraparound perforated grille, is reminiscent of a stealth weapon. It's safe to say £650 PCs don't usually look this interesting.

There's plenty to admire on the inside, too. As its name cryptically suggests, the i675n88GT teams a high-end 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 with an nVidia GeForce 8800GT graphics card. With 512MB of its own memory, this card allows the Eclipse to play the latest games with detail levels set to high, a feat well beyond systems with integrated motherboard graphics, such as the Philips and

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Very PC. The 8800GT is even quicker than the Cyberpower's ATI HD 3850 card.

Like all gaming machines worth their salt, the Eclipse's upgradability is excellent, with free PCI slots to add a sound card or wireless adaptor and plenty of unoccupied hard disk and optical drive bays. That said, with a 300GB drive already inside, you'll install plenty of games, photos, music and video files before you start running out of room. The 2GB of RAM should also be plenty for now.

And Eclipse haven't fallen at the final hurdle by messing up the peripherals. For keen photographers, the comprehensive memory card reader built into the front of the case is a welcome addition. The basic Microsoft keyboard and mouse combo do their jobs well, with the wired optical mouse providing enough zip and precision for gaming and the keyboard a solid enough feel for extended writing.

If you want to watch video on your PC from across the room, you may feel the 19 inch screen supplied with the i675n88GT is a little restrictive. That said, the popular Hannspree New York is a good quality monitor, and its love-it-or-hate-it industrial styling does go pretty well with the Eclipse's case. It's a sensible compromise to create a great all-round PC for the money.