Product Reviews

If you'd shown one of today's 3D shoot-'em-ups to a PC gamer a couple of years ago, they'd have thought you were a visitor from the year 3535. At least, they would if you could have found a system that would even run the games! Every month, the graphics used in action games become more and more stunning, and the demands they make on a PC become greater and greater. If your PC is more than a couple of years old, you'll need to invest in something with a bit more muscle to keep up. What you don't want to do, however, is pay futuristic prices. Luckily, Multivision's Ionix 59 Ultra, built around nVidia's latest and greatest FX 5900 graphics, costs just £999 excluding VAT!

At the heart of this machine is an FX 5900 UTD 256 graphics card from MSI. This is based on nVidia's FX 5900 Ultra graphics chipset, and boasts an enormous 256MB of RAM. Make no mistake: this is a card for serious gamers. Bought separately, it would cost you over 300 quid.

Of course, there's no point in fitting a powerful graphics card if it's hobbled by a slow processor or a lack of memory. Multivision has sensibly fitted an Athlon 3000+ and 512MB of 333MHz DDR RAM. This core spec is solid enough - but faster 400MHz RAM might have been a better match for the nVidia card.

Multivision continues the futuristic theme with its case. This looks great and is roomy inside. The side pulls down, providing easy access to the system's innards. Although the graphics card has its own fan, it's not too noisy. This comes as a relief, because the fans on nVidia's earlier FX 5800 cards sounded like an airliner taking off. On the downside, the FX 5900 is so bulky it obscures one of the PCI slots, meaning you have only two to play with if you

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fancy adding more cards. The motherboard's built-in audio chip can handle surround sound - as used in games and DVD movies - but if you want to get the best out of the Creative Inspire 5.1 speakers supplied, you might consider buying a dedicated sound card.

The chunky Mitsubishi DiamondPro 930SB monitor, with its huge 18in viewable screen area, produces a superbly crisp image. It has a Super Bright feature, which makes the picture less sharp, but the colours more vivid - ideal for games and DVD playback.

The NEC ND-1300 DVD rewriter is a good choice, because it handles both DVD+ and DVD- recordable formats. This means that whichever of the two becomes the standard, you'll be fine. There's also a DVD-ROM drive, so you can copy directly from disc to disc. Multivision hasn't cut corners with the Logitech mouse and keyboard, either - both are solidly constructed and pleasant to use.

The Ionix's 2D performance is excellent - more than good enough to cope with anything you'd want to throw at it. But, let's be honest, if you're buying this machine, it's gaming power you're really interested in. Fortunately the Ionix, with its cutting-edge graphics card, scored a hefty 16,382 points on our 3DMark 2001 benchmark. Had it been teamed up with faster 400MHz RAM, and one of Intel's latest Pentium 4 processors, the FX 5900 might even have rivalled the Dell Dimension 8300 on page 87. The Dell costs over £300 more, though - and the Multivision is gob-smackingly good as it is!

Raw power, however, is only part of the story. Modern graphics cards improve image quality with such features as 'anti-aliasing' (smoothing the edges of objects to avoid a jagged, pixellated appearance) and 'anisotropic filtering' (which prevents textured surfaces distorting). With all these features on full, Unreal Tournament ran happily at a resolution of 1,280x960, and looked great. The card also supports DirectX 9, the latest version of Microsoft's multimedia instructions. This allows programmers more control over the way effects are shaded, letting them create more realistic graphics.

There's only one negative thing to say about this PC: the lack of 400MHz DDR RAM means it doesn't quite fulfil its potential. But it's still a cracking gaming system with an incredible 3D score, at a fantastic price.