Product Reviews

Life must be hard for Intel at the moment. After years of setting the pace in the PC processor race, they've spent the last two being beaten up in performance tests by AMD's Athlon chip - a humiliation which the launch of Pentium 4 has done absolutely nothing to stop. Tired of having sand kicked in its face, Intel has now revved up Pentium 4 speeds to a staggering 1.7GHz. Could Intel's Athlon nightmare be over?

Well, things can only be getting better when you start to see Pentium 4 in systems like the Polar Premiere GF3. This machine has "hot-rod" written all over it, with a specification reading like a wish list of high-performance parts. Surrounding the 1.7GHz Pentium 4 you'll find a speedy Asus motherboard, 128Mb of Rambus memory and a 64Mb nVidia GeForce3 graphics card. That's breathtaking stuff, but then you take a look at the hard drive setup. Not content with one 7,200rpm IBM Deskstar, Polar has attached two 30Gb units to a Promise FastTrak 100 IDE RAID controller, configured for twin-disk striping. The controller distributes the reading and writing of data to both hard disks, using them in parallel for maximum speed. It sounds complex but the benefits are simple - incredibly fast hard disk performance.

Now, all this talk of speed might sound strange when you look down and see the disappointing score in our 2D application benchmarks, but don't worry. Few 2D apps make the most of the Pentium 4 architecture. Rest assured, this system will still burn through any word processing or spreadsheet task you throw at it, while laughing in the face of intensive graphics. Give this system something to get its teeth into, like video editing or 3D games, and it shines. With the ridiculously powerful GeForce3 at work,

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the Polar scored an incredible 9428 in 3DMark 2000, and even when faced with the challenges of 3DMark 2001 it still delivered an awesome result: 5960. If there's a game released in the next two years that the Polar can't handle at 1024x768 in 32-bit colour with every single detail option turned on, then I'll eat my hat. It's not a nice hat, by any means, so I don't make this promise lightly.

And best of all, this excess of power comes in a system that, with two minor exceptions, is high quality stuff through and through. The two thorns? Well, the keyboard is a nasty, rattly affair, and the speakers - a loud but slightly crude twin satellite and subwoofer set - are merely competent. The monitor, however, is marvellous. It's a 19in Iiyama Diamondtron affair with a beautiful, vibrant flat screen, offering perfect clarity and superb colour reproduction. With built in speakers and a four port USB hub, you'd have to work hard to find better.

As there are two hard drives, DVD-ROM and CD-R/W drives, a Sound Blaster Live! Player 5.1 sound card and a 56K modem already installed, there's not a lot of room for future expansion, but you could still fit an IEEE-1394 interface card, and a couple of externally accessible 3.5in drives. You will want more memory at some point in the future, but there are still slots for two more RAMBUS RIMMs. All the cabling has been tidily tucked out of the way, but we were surprised to see that neither the DVD-ROM drive or the CD-R/W drive was wired up to the audio connectors on the sound card - a little mistake, but careless.

By now, you can probably tell that we're pretty happy with this system, but it's not one that we can recommend to everyone. All this power comes at a very definite price. £1,500 before VAT and delivery isn't unreasonable, but when you can get a machine like last month's Evesham Axis 1.33 SK for only £999 then you have to think twice about paying out. If you're a hardcore gamer with money to burn, then buy it, but more casual users should check out Evesham's Athlon-based baby in the Buyer's Guide. And that's really still Intel's main problem: Pentium 4 needs to justify its price premium over the Athlon with superior performance in all applications, not just 3D games. Until that happens, AMD will carry on winning hearts and minds, including ours.